Gothic Granola

Laurie Sadowski has done it again. Canadian vegan and gluten-free cookbook author delivers excellent recipes, so I'm just adding a new filling option and an instructions tweak for high & dry altitude.  

This post has two geneses: as Fall rolls around to Northern Colorado (37 degrees yesterday, what?!), TC requested an apple pie, after I made Key Lime Pie a few weeks ago. One of the two things I didn't do before I left DC was to make VGF pie with my friend Andi. This is for you, Andi, since it's unlikely I'll be back in DC to bake pie with you anytime soon.  

Call me biased and call me teetering on the fine edge of victim-blaming, but really, one can choose not to be offended in this fairly innocuous trend:  #fitfam and the public celebration of physical fitness. I read this Elite Daily article and wanted to post my meal-prepped box of lunches all the more  (Then I stopped posting. More on that later) . FitFam is about working towards goals that have to do with physical fitness: for improved health, for better quality of healthy life, for competitions, for improved physical appearance.  I can do yoooooga!

Let us repeat lesson number one of living with food allergies: You will not be fed. Ever. So get used to it and plan ahead. You will save yourself time, money, and headache. If you learn anything from reading this blog, this is the lesson, hence why I repeat it so often. If you learn anything else, it's that with a little planning and thinking, being vegan and gluten-free can be as normal as breathing oxygen.

"Do you feel rushed?" Sometimes I wonder if my life is happening on a compressed time scale. Fasting last week slowed everything, including all my bodily processes, way the heck down. On the last two days, I found myself constantly apologizing for being too slow when walking or speaking.  After I broke the fast on Sunday, I went to the gym on Monday. Instead of killin' it on the elliptical, the elliptical liked to kill me! I had it on resistance one/manual and I still had  to push through the machine pausing because I wasn't applying enough force. My conclusion is that speed, as a quality or concept, is neither progress nor better; it's just faster than the pace of the prior moment.

Post #253 I have bloody scrapes on two fingers, a nice purple bruise and cut in one calf, a ruined batch of flapjacks, too much sugar, and a cancelled personal training session.  Then there's this.

Doing things a little differently today.

And if you're not a believer, is it really my job to make you one?

And if you're not a believer, is it really my job to make you one?

This morning as I ran to the farmers market, I noticed my freshly-loaded iPod shuffle was set on alphabetical sort by song title. Yeh, I didn’t think “Amame” followed “All Because of You.” I prefer to listen to albums in whole chunks with the songs in the artist’s intended order. Having the device on shuffle versus loop would make little difference. I could react in a few ways: 1)     Stay pissed off and complain about it. Take out earbuds in disgust. 2)     Accept it and see how the experience of random alphabetical order sounds. 3)     Change it!

I am very American in the fact that I like my car. Today my car was the instrument through which I received another wakeup call.

Another day, another dollar, another job application, another recipe…lest this gets boring, remember that you are alive, you can move, and you have the use of your five senses and third eye. Reverend Justin Terry’s take-home message from the Sunday evening service at Arlington Metaphysical Chapel was, God is blessing you, whether you can see it or not. But it’s always there.

Stare at blank paper every morning, every day and you will overcome the fear of The Blank Page. As a matter of course, you will begin to overcome other fears of beginnings and unknowns, as well. I hadthis insight about Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages exercise from The Artist’s Way while taking today’s walkies. In walking the last two days, I’ve uncovered two more nonnegotiables. I must make time to take a 20-70 minute walk each day. Walking not only relieves mental constipation, it’s frickin’ essential after being inside each day to remind the body, “You live on the Earth, not in buildings above the earth. This is where you come from. This is where you’ll go.”

A video primer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsQTzxzDYjw

Post II of III in Simple Gifts series Changing your health, particularly losing weight, isn't just about letting go of pounds, it's also about letting go of that which doesn't serve you: people, jobs, over-the-top responsibilities, habits...in short, Revolution! A revolutionary new way to have a brownie is this proteinaceous snack or pudding or dessert. It will satisfy you and give you energy to burn without a crash because the plant protein and fibre will slow down the absorption of the sugar from the dates.

Stretch it, psyche! “Everyone comes to shame through a people that cannot profit them, that brings neither help nor profit, but shame and disgrace” (Isaiah 30:5, NRSV).  Yes, dear readers, like many before me, I’m doing a circular, self-referential hermeneutic of the Bible.  Speak English?  I’m reading my life into and from the Bible and/or other sacred text I find on the path.

In advance of my Cinco De Mayo taco consumption, I made macadamia nut sour cream.