I think it was on Rawmoms that I saw one of the moms has created a cookbook for kids.  I thought that was a great idea.  But what I find with most cookbooks is that you only do a handful of recipes out of them and the rest just don't suit your family or tastes.  So rather than invest in a cookbook I figure I will create one with the kids.  We will only put in recipes that the kids love and that are easy enough for them to make. (or at least do most of it themselves!)  I make the recipe with the kids, taking pictures of the various steps so that the cookbook will have pictures as well as written instructions on how to make each recipe.

Here is the first recipe that will be going in our kid cookbook.  The idea behind this one comes from the chocolate syrup recipe from "Raw: The Uncookbook" by Juliano.  He combines maple syrup, EVOO, and carob.  I used to spread raw almond butter on pieces of banana, then drizzle with the chocolate sauce.  Here is our new creation - nutty chocolate sauce.

Posted in: bananas, raw almond butter, raw chocolate, Raw_Vegan Lane on Saturday, February 20, 2010 at at 1:48 PM 5 comments    

Since David and I were married, everytime a vehicle had an accident or was damaged, it was because of dear hubby.  I won't go into the long list (but it is looooong!) so as not to completely bash my poor husband.  But it has almost been a point of bragging rights for me that I had never damaged our cars.

Until yesterday.

We were coming home from church and decided to cut through Norwalk so we could dumpster dive at the Fareway.  Dumpster diving was a good decision as we got TONS of great produce -  tons of cucumber, oranges, grapes and apples, potatoes, brocolli, green onions, and several shrink wrapped packages of peppers and onions already cut up and just begging to be made into fajitas.

Anyway, we decided to cut through the back roads to come home.  The paved roads weren't bad at all.  Then we turned on the dirt road to head to our little piece of countryside.  It was so beautiful - snow packed roads, snow falling, driving through the woods - it always makes me think of that song:

"Over the river and thru the wood,
To grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh,
Thru the white and drifted snow, oh!"

The road ends at a T where you can go right to the Banner shooting range, or left, over a little bridge, and the road continues.  I put on the brakes extra early since everyone knows that driving in snow isn't a problem - it's stopping in snow that is a problem.  Well, the brakes immediately went into their anti-lock vibrations, which I HATE!  David insists that it would be worse without them, but you might as well just be sliding because you still can't stop the car with anti-lock brakes.  I tried pumping them, but there was just no traction.

We lucked out that there has been so much snow that has not melted and more snow on top of that because instead of running off the road and into the creek, we plowed into, and half on top of, a big snowbank.  I did take out the sign that told how much weight the bridge supported.

We also were lucky that the Banner shooting range was right there.  A car came down and picked up David and brought him down to find someone with a 4 wheel drive.  Then the 4 wheel drive came down and brought me and the girls to the main building so we could be warm while they located a tow strap and got the van pulled off the embankment.  The guys at the shooting range were so nice.  They gave all sorts of goodies to the girls while we waited - a camouflage drink holder, a Dept. of Natural Resources water bottle, and a duck call.  What more could you ask for?!

Anyway, apparently we were the third vehicle that morning to plow into the embankment at the end of the road.  When we drove out we could see where the other cars had ended up.  That made me feel a little better about crashing the van.  Also the fact that the car is okay.  There is a only a little place on the bottom side of the bumper that got bent as the van was yanked off the embankment.

I had David drive the rest of the way home after that little adventure onto the snowbank.  To further make me feel better, when we came to the first turn we could make to go home, David wasn't able to get the car slowed down in time to make the turn.  So we went straight, veeeerrrry sloooooowly to the next turn and made that one.  But if David had been faced with the end of a road like I had been, we would have been in the ditch again!

Posted in: dumpster diving, snow on Monday, February 8, 2010 at at 8:42 AM 2 comments    

Next week I have an appointment to meet with a WIC nutrition counselor so I can get our next round of checks.  I am working on finding articles and research online that I can take to support my position on how I eat and what I choose to feed my kids.  Now, I know life would be much simpler if I just sat there and regurgitated what I know they want to hear.  But I suck at lying.  So I am looking at this as a low level activist moment.  Instead of the "nutritionist" educating me on how to feed my family, I will be educating the nutritionist.

Today I started making some copies of articles from Dr. Mercola's website about milk.  That is obviously a big issue since the government standard is LOTS of milk for growing kids.  So I copied information about how bad pasteurization is on milk and why raw milk is the one that does a body good.  (currently illegal to buy in my state, though they are working on passing legislation to change that- hooray!)

I also am researching the links between big pharma, big agribusiness and federal positions that are supposed to be protecting us from those businesses.  I want to have a list of all the people that have transitioned from one to the other, thus showing how the reality is our best interests are not being served by the federal oversight.

The next information that I wanted was relating to the information from The China Study showing the irrefutable link between casein and cancer.  This got me thinking....I wonder what the Mercola website has to say about that.  I have been finding lots of great information there lately so thought I would check it out, hoping that it would validate the science.

I was shocked when the search did indeed turn up an article with the title:

Posted in: Raw_Vegan Lane on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at at 9:58 PM 3 comments    

I hardly know where to start to catch up.  Hmmm..

1. I got a job.  Hooray!  I will be doing some basic bookkeeping and payroll for a small company on the other side of Des Moines.  It is just 5 hours a week and I will be working on Monday while David is home to watch the kids.  Perfect!

2. The girls and I went "shopping" at Helping Hands the other day (a free thrift store) and they had cases of bananas available.  I think I must have taken about 10 bunches of bananas!  I am going to freeze most of them and they will be great in green smoothies with fresh fruit this summer - yum!  I also picked up a nice pair of shoes for wearing to work and some more tops that will be nice too.  Didn't see any pants there though - that's a bit of a bummer since I only have one pair of dress slacks.  I didn't ask about dress code, but it is just two ladies that run the place and one of them was wearing jeans.  I won't even be having any customer contact so I probably can get away with nice jeans too.  I will wear my slacks the first week and get that clarified.

Anyway, I am pretty excited about having a day where I get to take a break from being mommy, make a little extra money for us, and get to rub some brain cells together. :)

3.  I don't think I remembered to post the good news that we managed to get our house refinanced.  It was crazy!  We actually have a Freddie Mac loan so we qualified to do a stated income (which means no verification) refinance with only $400 up front.  But, somehow, only my name is on the mortgage.  So I had to be employed in order to qualify.  Yikes!  This was back in November we were trying to pull this together.  Anyway, I discovered that I could be self-employed if I had a business license that I could fax them to verify the business.  Well, I still have the license I was given to run my consignment business from back in 2008, so we were able to get refinanced based on that.  Guess that made my one-shot wonder sale worth it!  We will be saving $175/month on our mortgage payment.

4. Thursday morning was my weigh in for week one of the Hallelujah Acres 60 day challenge.  I have lost 4 pounds already.  Feeling pretty good about that!  I now weigh as much as I did when we left Arizona.  10 pounds down, 30 to go - sheesh!  But I am not worried about it.  I am focused on getting healthy and weight loss is a natural by-product.

As well as loving my green smoothies (and so are the girls) I am completely used to the idea of having a big salad at lunch and dinner.  That was the part that I was most worried about incorporating.  We think nothing of eating meat at 2 out of 3 meals (or 3 out of 3 meals!) but having salad twice is like, what?? I already ate a salad today!  I think what helps is that I don't feel compelled to keep it completely raw since the goal is 85% raw, so I can create variations to keep it interesting.  Example:  I put some black beans and spanish rice on my salad and make a salsa vinaigrette - a mexican salad. :)  But I am also just finding that my tastes are starting to make the switch over to enjoying the fresh, raw food better than the cooked food.

I really love the daily inspiration they email each day and also becoming a fan on Facebook was great.  More great tips are posted there.  I literally have signed up for so many raw and health emails that I am constantly getting something in my mailbox to keep me focused and on track!

Well, I will end with an inspirational video.  This lady is a raw foodist and a great example of what live foods can do for you. :)

Posted in: family news, Raw_Vegan Lane on Friday, January 15, 2010 at at 8:45 PM 0 comments    

Trinity set up a "tea" in the living room.  It was cute to see her selection of food for this little get together:
bananas
salad
raw trail mix
grape tomatoes (which Angelina obliterated and begged for more - she is a tomato freak!)
cheerios

Not a bad spread.  Good healthy choices. (like there's much else to pick from these days in our house!)  Then daddy shows up after making a dumpster diving run with 3 bags of sweet and salty chex mix and they were happily munching on garbage food again.

Rite of Passage





It's off to bed for me too.  No more up til crazy hours on the internet for me!

Oh, yeah.  I dropped 3 pounds since starting the Hallelujah Acres 60 day challenge last Thursday.  Two of those were pounds I found over the holidays.  But the other one pound was very significant for me.  It dropped me down into a weight range I haven't seen since Arizona.  Hooray!  I have to say, I am totally loving the green smoothies.  My cravings for sweets and garbage food are gone and I am having no problems with avoiding foods that aren't good for me.  I only had one green smoothie today though.  I need to make a larger quantity tomorrow morning so I will have more for later in the day.  The girls drank up all my smoothie this morning, but I'm not complaining!  How else do you get raw collard greens in a 3 and 5 year old?!

Posted in: green smoothies, hallelujah diet, Raw_Vegan Lane on Monday, January 11, 2010 at at 10:22 PM 4 comments    

I have to admit, that there are days when I worry about unschooling.  My type A, determined, organized half starts fretting and wondering if I was wise to allow my laid back, adventurous, spontaneous side to win in the battle of deciding how to homeschool our children.  There is still part of me that wants to not only keep up with the Jones' but also have my kids outperforming their counterparts.

When I was researching various curriculum's initially, one that really stood out to me was the Charlotte Mason method.  I loved a lot of aspects of her teaching method - copy work, nature journal, lots of outdoor time, learning from great literature.  One thing I remember reading was her distinction to NOT school until the age of six, but allow children to be children up to that point.  They will be learning, but not to sit down and do lessons with them before that age.

This is what I am attempting to do.  I have to fight off the urge to "do school" with the girls and allow them to enjoy their childhood free from mom pressuring them to be outstanding at an early age - ha!  Don't we all just want our kids to be the smartest, cutest, most inventive, creative kid that ever was?  It is really hard to sit back and just let them be. 

But to my amazement (and delight) the unschooling thing is actually working itself out.  Trinity has taken up copy work all on her own volition.  It started with a little diary that she bought for herself last summer at a yard sale with money she had made at a lemonade stand.  She loved to draw pictures in that diary and was so proud of it.  One day she came to show me her latest drawing, only to my surprise, the page was covered in letters.  At the top of each page the name of the month was printed, and she was copying the letters.  Soon she progressed to asking me to write something and then she would practice it herself.  Lately, it has been a small pocket sized New Testament from which she has been copying.

Mommy is breathing a big ol' sigh of relief!
My kid really is going to learn to read and write and do math.  It will happen!

Posted in: copy work, Homeschool Lane on Saturday, January 9, 2010 at at 8:30 PM 0 comments    

I start with steel cut oats.  Before going to bed, I put 1/2 cup of the oats in my liquid measuring cup, put 8 dates in, then add water to more than cover it all.  With this amount, a single serving, I filled to 1 1/2 cup line and there was still plenty of water left in the morning.  Drain the excess water.  If you want warm oatmeal, just run hot water over the oats while in the strainer.  If you don't want to have to drain it, then just cover with water.  You shouldn't have much if any excess by morning with that amount.


Put the oats and dates into a food processor.  Add a few sprinkles of cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg.  Process...


Remove from the processor and stir in a handful of raisins and chopped raw pecans.  Eat it up.  Yummmmm!


To celebrate the beginning of my new era of health (always the optimist, I am) here is a video of the author of The China Study giving a talk in which he basically summarizes the book and info.  "Main Finding - The richer the diet is in the kind and amount of nutrients provided by plant-based foods, the lower is the risk for chronic degenerative diseases."

Posted in: China study, oatmeal, Raw_Vegan Lane, recipes, videos on Thursday, January 7, 2010 at at 8:47 PM 0 comments