Science experiments

Left: milk on its way to becoming buttermilk.
Middle: cream on its way to being soured.
Right: oats soaking in water and acids so is easier on our tummies when we cook it tomorrow.

(Bacteria arrived in the mail today.)

Homemade butter

Its easier than you might think. Especially if you own a food processor. Dump in a quart of cream and blend until you hear a splash and a thunk. Separate the buttermilk from the yellow globs of butter.
Rinse butter in cold water. Salt. Voila!

p.s. Its way better if the cows you got the cream from are grass fed, better yet if the milk was raw or pasteurized at low temps.

Sourdough

We have a new pet in the family--a wild yeast starter. Right now it has to be fed and watered twice a day. It's so demanding. But eventually it gives you something back. And this is Take One of the fruits of our labors. Waffles, pancakes, bread--all sourdough and all yum.

Raw Table Saw

I just had to post and say I've now opened two coconuts with my table saw. Yes. I. Have.

If the blade height is adjusted just so, the blade will burn through the hard outer shell of the coconut, leaving the white meat in tact, and the coconut water safe on the inside. All I have next to do is cut through the meat with a knife, catch the water, and voila...easiest coconut I've ever eaten. I'm perfectly aware I could take a big cleaver and whack a coconut in half. Problem is I never hit hard enough the first 20 times, so little coconut shell chips fly all over the kitchen. With the table saw, I can score the coconut so it breaks into sixteen pieces, and I get the meat out with more ease.

The downside: coconut-sawdust in a thin layer over my entire body; coconut sawdust in my sinuses and eyes; sneezing from all that coconut in my nose.

Raw on a Budget; Raw in all seasons

The biggest problem in eating raw is not taste. It's money. For instance two pounds of organic tomatoes from the farmers' market costs about 4$. Zucchini noodles about 2$. That's makes four "servings" of raw spaghetti. The catch: tomatoes, garlic, zucchini don't pack the caloric punch of whole wheat spaghetti and canned spaghetti sauce, which I can purchase for about the same amount of money.

I still haven't figured out a way to make our budget fit with raw food. I start out the month optimistically, loading up on fruits and veggies at the farmer's market, or ordering bulk containers of raw organic coconut oil from discount stores online. But two-thirds the way into the month, I'm scrambling to stretch our remaining food dollars. Part of the problem is that our local harvest CSA program was supposed to start this third week in May. We've already put a sizeable portion of our food money toward the end of getting a farm fresh box of organic produce each week from here through October. Problem is, the rainy weather this year delayed planting of the seedlings. Our farm doesn't have anything for us and our money's tied up in the hopes that it will. Soon.

Recently Barbara Kingsolver documented a year of her family's experiment at living locally. One of her points is that it's hard to do this if you're unprepared. In other words, you have to make the most of the season's bounty--when produce is in excess--to prepare for the lean months. As a budget-conscious raw foodist/wannabe-locavore, I need not to buy tomatoes out of season, but purchase them when they're abundant, when all Iowans want to throw up if they have to eat one more tomato. THat's around August or September, and I know they'll be sold at reduced prices at the farmer's market. I can then freeze them or dry them and tuck them away for winter, so I can make my raw marinara and zucchini pasta for pennies.

The problem this year is that i'm behind. I have no apples or squash stored away from the fall. Now basil in my freezer from last summer. And of course, no tomatoes.

I have, however, contemplated and continue to contemplate, growing my own indoor avocado and lemon trees. You can never have enough lemons. Too bad I can't grow coconuts, bananas, mangos and cocao beans.

Is God Laughing?

As only a former anorexic can can confide in another, my friend K said the other night, while sampling some of my raw lemon-coconut macaroons, "They're good, but this feels too healthy." In other words, after all those years of carrot sticks and cottage cheese, K still feels like a too-long rendevous with fresh veggies and whole grains kicks her back in time to that 90-pound high-school-cheerleader mentality when carrot sticks and general deprivation was her lot in life. "Whenever that happens, I've gotta eat some junk food." And she does. Recovered long after her recovery was complete, I used to watch with envy and a certain degree of bewilderment as she ate half a bag of barbecue potato chips in one sitting, as she popped pocorn in olive oil for dinner, and when she broke out the Breyers mint-chocolate-chip ice cream afterwards.

In spite of the conclusion I've arrived at that I should do my best to honor this body God gave me, take care of it, feed it healthful things, there was something in her words that stung me, and I remembered how easily, in my carnal quest for peace and control, one obsession of mine can replace another. I'm not anorexic any more, but I've lived in my skin long enough to know I can pick up new rules for eating like I do a new memoir, and discard them just as quickly.

But just the same, after a birthday weekend filled with raspberry chocolate cake and baby shower-treats, I decided I would get back on the raw wagon. I thought about it in extremes: Maybe I would be 100% raw for 5 days (until the next family birthday celebration this comign weekend). Maybe the 100% raw thing could be like a spiritual fast, not something done just because. I could give up pizza for God. I read raw-food testimonials. Someone was cured of cancer through raw food. Someone else lost 100 pounds. A fifty year old "just keeps getting younger," having tapped into the vitality of a pack mule. What would it be like, I wondered, to be 100% raw for 2 years? What sort of energetic bliss could I enter into?

Two days back on my raw food wagon, I swear God played a joke on me and reminded me to stick with my new Rule To Trump All Rules, which is, simply put: No Rules.

There, on my back porch on Tuesday afternoon was a second-day air box, a belated birthday delivery. Its contents: 2 pounds of my favorite chocolate in the whole world. I've found this chocolate only on the west coast, Chicago, and at a little holiday kiosks in malls in other big midwestern cities. In other words, I hardly ever have an opportunity to buy it. When I do, its pricetag limits me. The dear lady who sent it to me ordered all two pounds to be packed in ice and shipped to me, having heard I loved it. I sat staring at the box and the irony of the situation did not escape me. I could not escape TWO POUNDS of chocolate, my favorite chocolate, cooked chocolate, staring me in the face. It was too much to quickly gobble up as a delightful one-time snack. Too much to even let sit on my counter for long, as the buttercream inside would go bad.

Unfortunately, I don't do well with excess. This might be related to the way I used to hoard food in my closet when I was five, thinking there wouldn't be any food for me the next day. Now, when I get a lot of something I love, I immediately fear losing it, and my impulse is to think I have to eat it all at once. I could feel my wheels spinning. What was I going to do with all chocolate? What was my plan for dismembering, piece by piece, the small bunker of cream and sugar and cocoa that trumpeted its presence on my kitchen counter? If I kept it in the house for a long time, I know it would call my name every raw day thereafter. I needed to enjoy it or in other ways get it out of my house.

Well, that was two days ago. I cannot claim I found any sort of zen when it comes to dealing with two pounds of chocolate. It's true my husband felt he had to take a chastising tone when cautioning me against throwing chocolate down the garbage disposal. Appalled, I claimed I would never do that. What I did was give a lot of it away. A huge portion to my mom, who also claims this chocolate as her fave. A couple pieces to a friend. More to my family. And, I ate milk chocolate bordeaux as meals for lunch and dinner, right along side my grapefruit and nori rolls. Do I feel as healthy and physically alert if I'd stuck with raw food? No. Did I keep to my No Rules rule in spite of all my intentions to the contrary? Yes. Is God laughing? Probably.

An Update

After eating only raw food for six days, I ate two meals of cooked food this past Sunday. Boy, the warmth and saltiness of that China Star garlic broccoli was delicious, but within a few minutes my nose started running and phlegm began collecting in the back of my throat. Gross but true.

That evening we also had dinner plans with my father and his lady-friend visiting from downtown Chicago. She'd been craving a Sonic burger (I don't know why), so they they picked up salty french fries and hamburgers for our fam. I ate it out of social niceness, but about a quarter of teh way through my Sonic burger I realized that there was absolutely nothign about it that appealed to me other than its temperature. I stopped eating, but my nose started running again.

Since Sunday I've eaten only raw food except for a cooked sweet potato, which is actually not wise to eat raw due to the enzymes it contains that work against digestion. I was pretty excited about it, pulled it hot from the microwave, drizzled olive oil and sprinkled salt on it. But with the first bite, somethign about it just didn't quite meet my expectations. I can't explain it other than it tasted dead, and by this point, I was so used to eating thigns that were alive, or at least not-dead, that I could tell a difference. It didn't call to me the way a sweet potato normally would. I never thought I'd get here, but I'm actually craving salads these days and can't wait for the farmer's market to open next month with fresh, local veggies.

The one downside to all of this is that I feel unusually tired, so tired I am inclined to nap in the middle of the day for hours at a time. I hope this changes soon, because my life can't sustain all this rest. I've read snippets here and there that this may be normal--that my body is "cleansing" itself of all is stored toxins, which results in us feeling exhausted. Nobody ever said cleaning house was easy, I guess.

Tonight is dinner with dad and lady-friend again. We're eating steak, and mine's going to be the rarest piece of meat I've ever put in my mouth. I've recently learned that some raw foodists (like Carol Alt) eat all sorts of meat and fish as long as its smoked or seared on the outside to kill bacteria. We'll see how that goes...