Got Kale?

It's the fight of the century!

Calcium vs. Oxalates:

The Battle for your Bones!

Check out my guest post at Dairy Free Betty!

Three-Day Kombucha

Is it possible?

When my pals at Go Indie asked me to do a review on Kombuchick's three-day brew, it was a gracious offer.

I love making coconut milk kefir, rice milk kefir, and lemon water kefir. However, as an adjunct English professor, time is not of my essence. I travel hours from school to school. My boyfriend lives an hour away from me. I rarely sleep in the same place every night.

Also - home base is with my parents. There's NO WAY my father's letting me keep a two-gallon jar of jellyfish tea in the kitchen.

Look at that monster.

Daily probiotic brewin' just ain't happenin' in my parents' house.

But the three-day brew? Now that's something that works for me. That's something small. That's something I can let sit.

So in January, I set up station. When you order the three-day brew, here's what you get.

Jar, sugar, and tea

Ziploc scoby




VERY helpful directions

I followed them like an evangelical follows the Bible. I sanitized EVERYTHING with boiling water. I made sure the sugar dissolved completely into the hot brewed tea. I cooled the tea in the fridge, before adding the scoby.

I poured the cooled tea into the jar...

... and everything fit PERFECTLY!!!

Then, I placed the scoby in the tea and set it in the warmest place in the house: my bedroom.

Our Blessed Mother of Booch

Sooooo...

Did it work?

Yes and no.

See, I started this booch in January. Probies don't grow well in the cold. They need warmth. So even though I tried to grow this booch in a warm room, it was not warm enough.

Still. It took a WEEK. That's all. That's awesome.

DELICIOUS!!!

Now that it's warming up in Pennsylvania, the booch is warming up too. It's taking five days, four days. By May, I'm sure it will be a three-dayer.

Much like kefir grains, scobys grow. Check out the farm I got goin' in this batch!


As you can see, in only a few months, I can make more kombucha, because I have more scobys. If you do this at home, please know that you don't have to pile on the scobys like I do. You can give them to friends. It only takes one scoby to make a good booch.

There are a lot in my jar because I'm an experimenter!

Kombucha is amazing for tummy probs, my fellow IBSsers out there. It's also invigorating. (I used to it get me off caffeine this past year.) I love drinking it when I'm on my long drives to and from school or the boyfriend's. It keeps me going and curbs my appetite.

So - If you are like me - stuck in your parents' house thanks to the recession, or maybe you'd just rather not have an enormous jar of jellyfish tea sitting on your kitchen counter - check out the kombuchick!

For the Love of Carbs...

My favorite restaurant ever? Dough Rollers.

I don't know if there are any still in existence. Friends and I always ate there when vacationing in Ocean City, Maryland during high school. It was always the highlight of the trip for me!

As a child, my favorite foods were pancakes, pizza, and cake. As a teen, it was mac and cheese. Today, I still love on my pancakes, but I also love sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and any whole grain.

Sareena's amazing gluten free vegan pancakes!

My love of carbs is not diminished by my favorite weight loss story.

Back in 2004, I waited tables at a prominent Boston tourist trap, pulling 13 hour shifts a day. The restaurant didn't allow servers to eat anything on the menu, and refused to give us breaks to run out to get grub. Complimentary cornbread was given out to every table. So that's what I pinched. All summer long, I subsisted off cornbread and Dunkin' Donuts mochas. And I lost twenty pounds.

Those pounds never came back. And yet, I've known for a while now that I'm not as thin as I should be. I am a gluten free, soy free vegan who counts her sugars and works out four days a week. And look at me:

Do I look like a fat girl?



Maybe not from this angle...

How about here?

Maybe "fleshy" is a better term?

Or there is the godawful "curvy" that is used waaaaay too much.

Me and Dainty Bones on New Year's


Okay, maybe I'm not fat.

But I'm definitely not as thin as I should be.

To get to the lardy bottom of me, I scheduled a wellness coaching session at my gym. In the meeting, Coach Mike measured my percentage body fat. I held my breath as he wrote down the numbers. It came out to 27%.

GAH!!!

That's ten percent more than it was in college, when I didn't work out, when I was a smoker who drank forties of malt liquor every single night. That's also fifteen percent higher than I thought it would be.

Coach Mike offered lots of great suggestions.

• Do shorter, more intense cardio
• Less yoga at home, more classes
• Use nautilus machines to work on "problem areas"
  
• Use a balance ball to do crunches and planks
• Eat MORE often: Six small meals a day
  
• Log food and exercise at My Fitness Pal!
  

The last one, I started right away.

Currently, my Fitness Pal has me on a regimen of working out four days a week for forty-five minute intervals and eating 1200 calories a day.

Mid-way through the very first day, I noticed something. Post lunch, I'd exceeded my fat intake, and way underscored my carb intake. Together, this added up to a high calorie count for the day, but without eating that much food.

Could it be the raw breakfast cookies?

During the second and third days, I learned more and more. Did you know that it's insanely less caloric to eat a salad with hummus instead of evoo and nooch? I didn't.

Holy Nooch!

Did you know that one single avocado eats up one-fourth of sedentary calorie intake and nearly an entire day's worth of fat? I knew they were fatty, but geez!

Avocado on Udis... my new favorite dinner!

Let's not forget my daily snack of chocolate bars...

... And my love of drinking!!!

Did you know that it's way less caloric to drink a vodka and soda rather than a Redbridge? Okay, that one doesn't surprise me. But it's nice to be reminded.


Am I talking bad about fats? Absolutely NOT! My problem was that I was eating far too much of them. I put nut butter AND coconut oil cacao sauce on my sweet potatoes. Then I ate a heavily noochy and evoo'd salad. Most days, I ate an avocado. For dinner, I threw a huge slab of vegan soy free butter into brown rice, amaranth or quinoa.

There's a lot of vegan butter under those veggies!

Combine these meals with a moderate workout aaaaand... I'm guessing fat's how I got my lovely lady lumps.

In the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if my love of carbs is somehow instinctual. Could it be that my body is thinnest on carbs? Furthermore - how am I going to balance this fitness program with my super-raw IBS-friendly diet?

Stay tuned!!!

Toots

How do you feel about the whole fat controversy?

Do you think fat is good or bad for you?

What do you do to maintain your weight?

Milk and Cookies from the Same Teat!

Lately, I have felt like an imposter.

Of all the health food bloggers, the healthiest claim that the healthiest of healthy choices one can choose is making your own nut or seed milk.

This is because of all the gross additives in store bought vegan milk.

For me, milk-making is a hassle. I have to process 8 ounces at a time. And I drink about 32 ounces of nut or seed milk a week! (That's a normal, non-IBSsy week too.) So rarely did I do it.

Check out my pain-in-the-ass process!!!

Two weeks ago, my girl Robyn from Go Indie got me thinking about making milk again. She had my boyfriend and I over for an amazing dinner. As we do when we get together, we talked vegan milk and cheese-making techniques. I looked at her pristine shiny blue-white bottle of hempmilk in the fridge and instantly felt jealous.

I thought: Enough with the carageenan!

Enough with the lecithins!

That Monday, I pulled out my big bowl, my clothespins, and my ratty old t-shirt.

In the middle of making almond milk, I realized something. Now that I have a dehydrator, I can use the leftover nut pulp. Making milk is not just about the milk. I can make milk AND cookies at the same time!

So that's what I did. Here's the recipe.

Nut and Seed Milk

1/4 cup of your favorite nuts or seeds

Process in a food processor or blender

Add 1 cup water

Let it whiz and churn until white and creamy

Strain through nut milk bag (or old t-shirt, as I do)

Drink

Feel luxurious

This past week, I discovered that hazelnuts break down SO much easier than almonds. Macadamias and hemp seeds do too. Other milks like pumpkin seed, sesame and sunflower have always left a bad taste in my mouth. Brazil nuts and pecans make such amazing butter; why waste their gloriousness on milk that's just okay?

To make the cacaokies, nut or seed pulp is necessary. Dates are too. Together, they make everything stick. Other than that, add what you want!!!

Cacaokies

Take leftover pulp from 32 ounces of milk

Add 1 tablespoon of maca powder

Add 1 tablespoon of yacon powder

Add 2 tablespoons of lucuma powder

Add 10 chopped dates

Add cacao nibs

Process until you have a sticky dough*

*If having trouble getting the dough to bind, add agave or flax seed meal

Form into patties

Dehydrate at 105 degrees for 2 hours on each side

DEVOUR!!!

These cookies are my favorite breakfast ever. They are PERFECT for IBS. They are light so they don't weigh down my tummy. But they are also full of so many good superfoods. Every time I eat them I feel ready to take on the world!

Some more cacaokie porn...

Gojis made these orangey!

Topped with Averie's coconut oil chocolate!!!

Toots

What's your favorite cookie?

What's your favorite breakfast?

What are you totally in love with right now?

Did you see who won the CSN contest???

Who's the Big Winner?

The random number generator chose number 19.

That means the winner of the CSN giveaway is...

IRIS from The Daily Dietribe!!!

Yay!!!

Congrats, Iris!

I will message you the deets!

As for everyone else, I hope the raw cacao cookie recipe I'm posting tomorrow will suffice as a consolation prize.