Add garlic; after water-frying, stir in a small lemon, 1 Tbl tahini, and just a tad of ume plum vinegar (since it’s salty). Amazing anytime, I’m having it for breakfast – yum!

Thank you to some of our dear family friends for this recipe.

Nut Roast

Cook Time: 60-70 minutes Source: parsleysoup.co.uk 

INGREDIENTS

3/4 cup red lentils

1/2 cups mixed nuts

1 cup peanuts

1/2 cup other nuts (e.g. walnuts, cashews, brazils) works well)

3/4 cup drained can of tomatoes

1 tbsp peanut butter

Thyme or mixed herbs

Salt (or crumbled stock cube) and pepper

DIRECTIONS

1) Cook lentils in water for about 20 minutes. Drain well.

2) Put nuts in a blender until finely chopped. Add all other ingredients and blend for a couple of seconds.

3) Press mixture into a greased loaf tin and cook for about 1 hour at 200C until solid and browned.

4) Good served with some sort of sauce

1 cup of arugula, 1 frozen banana, 2 tbl. cocoa (no sugar), 2 tbl. flax seeds, 1 cup any vegan milk and 1-2 cups of water (I like mine to be like a drink). Substitute with kale. The raw dark greens make the chocolate like a dark chocolate. If you need it sweeter add a date. YUM. Enjoy.

Mincing the pine nuts releases their oil into the raddichio (mash it together) – that’s it – two ingredients! It’s a staple for years now for me- I love the bitter flavor. (2-3 tbl of nuts per head)

Chai is the word for tea in India. So when we say chai tea, we say tea tea, which we’d never drink – LOL. If you suffer from digestion issues, it might be worth it to start exploring chai. Making it yourself, you get to choose how much of what spices and which tea.

Opening yourself up to the world of tea and herbs and spices – wow it’s a huge world, easy to feel overwhelmed just seeing all the healing properties of spices and herbs – my gosh! It’s a huge field and tea history/herb books are starting to pile around me (DK has the best book on herbs I’ve found so far: Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine). Yet it’s amazing how if you walk into any common drug store, it feels like herbs have been banned. When the only-synthetic options for seasonal allergies no longer worked for me, the Walgreens pharmacist smartly told me to head to the Community Pharmacy (where I found Aller-Aid from Oregon’s Wild Harvest – and Voila! I couldn’t believe it – it worked and has all these years) – this led me to start researching herbs and duh! – teas! pots of which you get to slurp down all day long!

At night, right now, it’s the hibiscus leaves I tossed into cold water in the fridge (cold brew any tea you like and avoid destroying any of the anti-oxidant properties), sometimes I add mineral water or tart cherry juice. This morning I’m drinking Masala Chai which I cooked up yesterday and stored in the fridge (I used Dr. Greger’s recipe that uses date sugar).

Seeing the countless variations, asking someone if they like tea is like asking if they like vegetables. There are very different flavors even just among any of the single tea families: white, green, yellow, wulong, black, aged (Pu er, Liu Bao, Lu An, Fuzhuan, Her Cha), flavored or scented, smoked, herbal.

Watching the tea leaves unfurl – it’s like putting a garden in your cup. And for digestion issues, every time you drink the right tea for you, replacing the cup of coffee, you may find healing and recovery. Many slices of ginger in your chai, amidst fennel, cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves – it’s all healing your poor gut. Coffee is known to cause issues for some folks.

Your body is your laboratory, with enough attention to what’s happening and studying of the options – you get to make choices that simply (experientially) work better. It’s true we get emotionally attached to habits that are not working for us – where our physiology is repulsed – the emotional attachment is making it so hard to try something new. It takes a lot of compassion and care and thought really to relook at any of our habits. I like James Clear’s ideas about how to work on the small aspects of habits – focus all your attention on the details and making a new habit available and convenient.

Beets (“love beets” come pre-cooked in a bag; sweetens and grounds the stew), potatoe, purple cabbage, boiled onion and garlic (so no re-stir-frying at all just everything into water – hold parsley for last), cayenne, cinnamon, fennel seeds, veggie broth powder (seitenbacher), carrots, green lentils, tomato paste

Chard, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, garlic, red wine vinegar, use plum vinegar, dried cranberries, water stir-fried

Add flax seeds, frozen banana, aronia berries, cocoa powder (no sugar). I wish you could see the color in person.

Farmers market haul just now: