bikram yoga, class 4

my fourth class. a real disappointing class. for several reasons.

first, a woman came in late to class and set her mat directly in front of me. she proceeded to spend the entire class one to three beats off from the rest of the class AND talking to the (admittedly very handsome) teacher. but come on!! it was so distracting. she moved into and came out of postures at different times than the rest of the class, she left the room once, got up and got a tissue once, talked directly to the teacher 3 or 4 times.

in bikram yoga, you're supposed to move together as a class throughout the entire 90 minute class in controlled and precise movements. its not only about doing the postures, its about staying as still as possible between postures despite the sweat and the heat and the discomfort and your clothes sticking to you in the most unfortunate of places. its just part of the practice. and teachers are supposed to keep students accountable to this part of the practice -- reminding students to stay together as a class. even the corpse pose is one you do with precision and control.

the hot (pun intended) teacher, eddie, would not say anything to this woman even though it was obvious it was all a play to get his attention. it was obnoxious but mostly just really distracting.

second, for some reason it seems like the yoga teachers here move faster. there is less time to rest between each posture and so i spent this class especially just feeling like i could never catch up. normally breathing comes natural to me in class, but today i not only was not aware of my breath throughout class i also just couldn't ever get settled into breathing at all. i felt like i spent the whole class trying to catch up.

third, i'm just exhausted today. not sure really why. yesterday i felt great after class. today i just felt angry and bothered and like i just couldn't keep up.

fourth, i've been having a really hard time with anything that has to do with balancing. so many of the first postures -- the standing series; the majority of the class -- are about balancing with a strong, locked standing leg while doing some wild things with the top half of your body. i can't seem to get past the first step of any of the balancing postures. today, because of the distracting woman in front of me -- or actually because of my inability to tune her out -- i fell out of the postures (or couldn't even get into them) even more than in my first class four days ago.

on another note, my headache is still gone. my muscles are feeling less stressed and tight and more open, flexible, clean. i'm still really glad i'm doing this. it is an amazing experience even with the challenges. i can feel my body getting stronger and my life focusing in on the important things -- the things i want and who i am.

my stomach and hips still are pudgy and i wonder how long it will take with a regular practice before i start to see a difference, not only in my physical appearance but in my core strength -- which, once developed will help me go much deeper into all the postures.

on yet another note, i rode my bike to an urban organic farm about a mile from where i'm staying here in austin. i bought fresh heirloom tomatoes (oaxacan jewels), fresh basil, arugula, french sorrel, pigweed amaranth, peaches and cherry tomatoes along with some pickled zucchini sticks. me and amy jones had a great picnic lunch on the UT campus and then repeated the same exact meal for dinner. this is what we had:

• arugula and french sorrel salad with peaches, yellow cherry tomatoes, spicy roasted pumpkin seeds and a sweet vinaigrette
• fresh baked 6th street sourdough bread from sweetish bakery
• sliced oaxacan jewel tomatoes with sea salt, pepper and slivers of basil
• various cheeses, sliced
• a few pieces of fried turkey bacon

it was the most satisfying meal i've had yet this summer. so simple. so many vegetables. so many fresh, crisp flavors.

until tomorrow.

My Favorite Meal of the Year: Morels and Ramps

Yesterday, I ate my all time favorite meal of the year. It is only possible to eat this meal once or twice a year. Three times if you are really lucky -- which I may be this year.



The meal I am referring to is fresh morel mushrooms and ramps (wild leeks) sauteed in butter with red pepper, salt and fresh garden sage served with rice. It is one of the simplest meals I ever make and also one of the most delicious and uniquely satisfying.

Morels are one of the most famous of the wild mushrooms. Rare, elusive and only found growing for a few weeks a year, often deep in the woods. They can appear overnight with just the right combination of warm, humid weather, sunshine and the correct soil makeup.

A morel hunter must develop a keen eye for finding these mushrooms as they poke their multi-toned brown heads above and through the leaf litter that surrounds them. Often you can look at an area of moresl for a long time before you actually see the mushrooms right in front of you. Once you learn to see them, you can spot them easily, from a distance and often out of the corner of your eye despite their camoflaged appearance.

Since I just moved from the deep woods of southeastern Ohio to the city of Dayton, I thought for sure my annual spring meal of ramps and morels would be impossible to come by. But my parents live on a beautiful 3 acres with nice big trees and the biggest patch of morels I have ever seen in my life. They are prolific and growing right next to the driveway under a giant old ash tree. My mom told me they were poking their heads out of the soil, and I quickly went to investigate. I found 20-30 morels, some as large as the mouse for my computer.

With a little rain tomorrow, they could balloon up even bigger. One year, the morels here grew as large as a coffee mug.

The ramps or wild leeks show their leaves early in the spring in the underbrush of the still leafless forest, looking much like a lily or any other non-descript leafy green. But when you pick them, they give off a pungent onion-y smell and their flavor is unique. I always leave the bulb and eat the leaf though some people I know dig up the whole plant. The leaves are so good by themselves, I see no reason to take the whole plant for myself.

If you are lucky enough to have some morels and ramps, you can prepare them as follows for a uniquely and deeply nourishing spring dinner. Please note that my mother is very allergic to morels. I have never met anyone else with this allergy, but be aware that it can happen.


The Best Meal of the Year

Soak morels in salt water to remove bugs (at least 1 hour)
Slice morels into 1/4" thick slices
Heat butter to very hot.
Add morels, crushed red pepper, celtic sea salt and sliced fresh sage to hot butter.
Cook for no more than 1 minute on high heat.
Turn off heat and stir in sliced ramp leaves, stirring until residual heat has wilted them.

Serve over brown rice.

Sara's (Raw) Beet Salad

". . . the recipe is officially known as "Sara's Beet Salad." Yeah, everyone who has tried it raves about it. What a way to gain fame and immortality!"

This was an excerpt from an email I got from a friend about the fresh beet salad recipe I gave him last summer. I made this salad up after I got back from traveling in South America. It was in Peru and Ecuador that I was first introduced to beets. Until then, I had only seen beets in a can and what a travesty that was -- the beets in the can and my ignorance. In the Andes Mountains, they put fresh steamed beets and raw avocados on beds of lettuce, sprinkled with lime juice and call it a salad. I was inspired by the South American beets -- even though I just realized that I never even learned the word for beets. ( I just looked it up and it is remolacha -- pronounced with the emphasis on the -lach-)

The food in South American markets is so fresh and full of flavor and color that it was really difficult to return to the dull, drabness of the flavors and colors of the typical North American supermarket. The food down south of the border made me feel alive in a way that most conventionally grown food in the US could not live up to. I suppose in retrospect, it was my travels in Latin America that brought me round full circle to my current food preferences and philosophy which includes at its heart: local, seasonal, organically grown, sustainably and justly produced and made from scratch. I hope to make my life work providing food that fits this criteria to as many people as possible.

The beet salad is prepared as follows:

Sara's (Raw) Beet Salad

2 large organic purple beets, shredded
olive oil
fresh lime juice
3-5 fresh cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. fresh ginger, shredded
2-3 Tbsp. red onion, shredded
black or cayenne pepper to taste
1 tsp ground cumin
1 cup fresh parsley, chopped
1 tsp Bragg's liquid aminos or 1/2 tsp. tamari

Add olive oil to grated beets until beets are just coated, but not swimming in oil.
Add juice of fresh lime, to taste.
Add minced garlic, ginger and onion.
Add pepper to taste.
Add ground cumin, parsley and Bragg's.
Mix well together and serve.
If you serve this salad with avocados, the avocados will really bring this light, airy salad back down to earth. They are a great compliment to each other. However, if you are feeling heavy, slow or sluggish, just eat the beet salad by itself or maybe with some rice or salad greens (even better). It is an excellent cleansing salad.

Veggie Currry

My sister sent me this request . . . "do you have any recipes for spicy indian food using cauliflower & potatoes".

And I do in fact have such a recipe. Here it is. This recipe was scaled down from one used to serve 40 people so definitely play around with the amounts of veggies needed as this will likely make enough curry to feed a family of 10 -- I made this for a permaculture class with Peter Bane that I helped cater last summer. It was a big hit. Also go light on the cayenne and hot chile until you know what you like. You can always add more hot stuff but it's really hard to water down hot stuff once it's already cooked.

Not much time for writing today. I am starting to build this site and adding features when I can. It's a lot of fun but kind of a long and tedious process since I have no clue what I am doing. Hope you like it!!

Veggie Curry a la Sara

¼ cup canola oil
1 tsp. Black mustard seeds
1 Tbsp grated ginger root
½ head garlic, cut into thin slices
1 cup finely chopped onions
3 Tbsp ground coriander
1 tsp. Turmeric
3 Tbsp curry powder (hot curry if you want it spicy)

2-4 green peppers, seeded and sliced into bite size pieces
2-4 pounds carrots, cut into ¼ inch thick slices
1 head broccoli
1 head cauliflower
4 medium sized potatoes, cubed

2 ½ cans coconut milk
1 bunches scallions/green wild onions
½ hot green chili pepper, seeded and minced
1 Tbsp salt
1/8 cup cilantro, minced

¾ cups peanuts (optional)
1 tsp. Cayenne pepper (or to taste) – depends on how hot the chili pepper is or you can omit the chili pepper and just use cayenne

Heat oil, adding the first 7 ingredients and cooking thoroughly in a large, deep stock pot
Have all veggies cut into bite sized pieces ahead of time.
Add the veggies to the oil mixture
Mix scallions, chili pepper, salt and half the cilantro into the coconut milk
Add coconut milk to the veggies and simmer until veggies are soft over high Heat

Add peanuts and cayenne pepper during the last 10 minutes of cooking and allow to cook until veggies have reached the right amount of hotness. The longer you heat it, the hotter it will get.

Garnish with additional cilantro and serve over rice.

Three Sisters Stew

I have lots of black beans in my life right now. 3 gallon jugs full of dried black beans (the same amount of garbanzos too) -- more than enough to last me for several years since, of course, beans double in size when cooked. 12 gallons of beans. Well, I have some work ahead of me to find creative uses for these little guys.

I also have a very large (I mean like 3 times the size of my head) hubbard squash and a container of these weird dry corn kernels that are also quite large compared to the normally tooth sized corn kernels we are used to seeing in the US. they are closer to the size of a dime or even a nickel, than the size of a 10 year old's tooth. This dried corn was procured at a nameless international food market some years ago with no label, so I'm not even sure what to call them, though in my mind I have begun calling this particular ingredient parching corn -- but keep in mind that this is only my own made up name and not based on any kind of research or fact.

So with these three things in mind I decided to make something that I am calling the Three Sisters Stew. Some people may not be familiar with the term three sisters. It was used to describe the trio of corn, beans and squash that native americans began cultivating a few thousand years ago and which sustained them fairly abundantly through the colonial invasion of the 1700's and 1800's, when most native groups were uprooted and forced to take on new agricultural practices in new habitats out of necessity rather than choice.

The three sisters grew well together with corn creating a stalk for beans to grab onto and climb up and with the broad leaves of squash creating a blanket over the surrounding ground that kept moisture in and weeds down. The three complimented each other nutritionally as well, providing many more necessary nutrients than either crop could provide alone. The beans and corn together provided a complete protein and the combination of these with the squash kept the corn from leaching important minerals and nutrients from those whose diet was based on this important early native-to-america grain.

In addition, corn alone can greatly drain nutrients and especially nitrogen from the soil, being a heavy feeder while it grows. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil and so, in addition to providing good nutrition for people, these three sisters also protected the delicate balance of the soil for much longer than a monocrop of any of these three would alone.

In Ohio, there is archaeological evidence of these three sisters being dominant in native gardens dating back to at least 1000 years ago. Currently, Ohio has quite bastardized this tradition by planting huge tracts of genetically modified corn and soy beans primarily used for animal feed -- not together but strictly separated along farm boundaries. Pumpkin farmers plant huge fields of pumpkins for the annual pumpkin mania that happens each fall around Halloween. Most of our other squashes and almost all our edible corn and beans are trucked in from the southwest, California and other countries.

Well, anyway, I'm sure I could go on and on about how I wish the current food system was different -- more localized, less dependent on trucks and pesticides and not threatened by the booming "green" energy of biomass, ethanol and corporate biodiesel, but that's for another time.
Three Sisters Stew

soak 2 cups black beans
and 1 cup dried corn kernels
in 6 cups clean water
soak these overnight

Dump soaking water. Beans and corn should take up 1/3 of your pot. Fill pot to 2/3 full with water and bring to a boil. Boil lightly for up to 6 hours, adding more water if needed. (I tend to boil my beans for a long time or else I have a hard time digesting them appropriately -- in other words they make me fart a lot and make me constipated -- if you don't have this problem then follow whatever guidelines you usually use for cooking dried beans. I think most sources say that soaked beans only have to boil for a couple hours).

While beans and corn are cooking, bake an orange squash in an oven at about 375*. Can Use Hubbard, acorn, butternut or whatever kind of winter squash you have. Cut squash in half and put face down in about 1 inch water and bake til soft. Pull from oven when soft and let cool.

Saute
3 Tbsp. cumin seed
and 1 head of minced garlic in
1/4 cup butter or oil (I like butter better because it has a richer flavor)


At the end of the boiling,

add 4 sheets crumbled nori wrapper or a handful of dulse (a type of seaweed)
add 1/4 - 1/2 cup of brown sugar
add salt to taste
add cayenne pepper to taste


Add
up to 4 cups of the cooked squash
the sauteed garlic, butter and cumin
to the beans and corn.

If you like meat, add some chunks of cooked sausage, pork roast or maybe even chicken.

Let all this cook together for about 1/2 hour and then serve garnished with

chopped parsley
ramps
chives
cilantro

A Spring Cleaning Salad

This week I've been eating the most amazing food. Here is what it mostly consists of -- a rough recipe.

A Spring Cleaning Salad

garlic (chop it up -- as much as you like to eat in one sitting)
ginger (same as above)
1 whole beet chopped into small cubes
1 whole parsnip (peeled and chopped into small cubes)

heat some olive oil in a small skillet (cast iron works best)
break up some dried whole red chiles and drop them in the oil (again as much as you can
stand to eat in one sitting -- I usually use 2 whole chiles, seeds and all but I like really hot
spicy food.)
stir chiles in oil, then add the chopped veggies to the oil
stir and mix all together
pour in some raw apple cider vinegar
and some Bragg's liquid amino acids or maybe some soy sauce (whatever you have
available)

continue heating this til the roots are just getting tender and the vinegar/bragg;s has reduced to about half its original volume -- maybe 4-5 minutes.

meanwhile, put some salad greens (organic are best for cleansing purposes but whatever
lettuce like things you have will probably work) into a bowl
sprinkle some cheese on the greens
put some homemade sauerkraut (see earlier posting on this blog -- storebought sauerkraut
is not recommended since it tends to be soggy and somewhat flavorless and either way is
not nearly as alive or vibrant as homemade) on top of the salad greens
pour the beet, garlic, ginger mixture on top if this pile of stuff in your bowl.
top with a handful (really a handful) of chopped parsley and cilantro
I put some flax oil on top of all of this just cause I have it in the house and I hear it's supposed
to be good for me.

Eat this with some fresh baked bread or just as it is and your body will love you. It makes me feel really clear, alive, energized and zing-y (you'll see what I mean).

Play-Dough: A Recipe for a Lazy Saturday Morning with Young Friends

A few weeks ago, I hung out with my friend Autumn, who also happens to be 8 years old. In planning for this time together, I remembered the best book I ever had as a kid, "The Everything Book", which included tons of activities to keep kids occupied, inspired and creative. In it, I remembered vaguely in my kid-rusty 32 year old brain, was a recipe for home-made play-dough.

I quickly called home to my parents, the intrepid guardians of this wonderful, important piece of their children's history. My Dad found the recipe and recited it to me over the phone. With recipe in hand, Autumn and I set out to recreate this exciting childhood experience.

The Recipe:

2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup salt
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 cup water
food coloring of your choice
peppermint or other essential oil (a few drops only)

Heat oil in saucepan. Add other ingredients (except peppermint oil and food coloring) to heated oil, water first. Cook 3 minutes stirring constantly. Drop ball of dough onto foil or cutting board to cool. Once it is cool enough to work, split into sections and add food coloring a few drops of essential oil. The dough stinks so even though the essential oil is not necessary, it makes the stuff more pleasant to play with). Commence to play. The dough can be baked into any shapes if desired. It will harden when baked so you can make ornaments, figures, anything and make them permanant by baking them. Or just build little houses and furniture and habitats that you can destroy as soon as you're done, like Autumn and I did.

Play nice.

The Best Sauerkraut, Happy new Year

It is so beautiful in southern Ohio today. I woke up (rather late really) and it was about 70 degrees. The birds were singing and it felt like one of those dreamy spring days when everything is possible. It felt like movement, like making a decision, like letting go.

It seems like it always gets warm in January here these days. Last year, the daffodils and crocuses started blooming in January, then the temperature dropped below zero for 2 weeks in February and our whole year was thrown off -- I mean what is spring without daffodils or summer without peaches?

I canceled my trip to California. My sickness was bronchitis and I am only now, a month later, starting to finally kick it. I decided to stop eating on Saturday. I fasted for about 36 hours and the deep, choking, wheezing cough disappeared. Today I started eating my homemade sauerkraut (yum) and brown rice and I feel sooo much better.

Here's the recipe for the sauerkraut I made which turned out amazing.

1 head white cabbage, chopped small
1 head red cabbage, chopped small
4 onions cut into thin slices
2 heads garlic, (cut each clove in half)
5 carrots, shredded
maybe 3 Tbsp. celtic sea salt
some crushed red chile flakes, to taste
caraway seeds, to taste

Create layers of all the veggies, distributing each evenly throughout or not. (You can always mix it later). AFter each few inches of veggies are laid in the container (I used a large 5 gallon food grade plastic container) sprinkle with sea salt, caraway seeds and hot pepper flakes. Once you run out of veggies to layer into the container, lay a few whole cabbage leaves over the entire mess, put a plate on top and weight the plate down with something. Cover with a towel to keep out bugs and dog hair. If within 24 hours there is not enough brine or liquid to cover the veggies, add some salt water to cover them. Keep the weight on the plate and ignore it in the corner of your kitchen for at least a few weeks.

After a few weeks, remove the weight, the plate and the whole cabbage leaves and taste test the kraut. You can do this by sticking a CLEAN spoon down into the mixture and pulling out a spoonful. If it tastes fully fermented and delicious, it's ready. If it tastes off or weak or not to your liking, just let it sit a while longer, covered, checking every few days or so. The fermentation time will vary depending on the temperature where you're fermenting it -- heat speeds it up, cool slows it down. If it's ready, pull off the cabbage leaves and any of the scum on top of the sauerkraut, mix it all together and put in the fridge. This is the best sauerkraut I've ever eaten. This amount made about 2 gallons, which in my house is disappearing quickly.

So, I will leave you with that. I have to get outside to the dark, warm air of this January evening.