Play with your food 6: throw it together

As she was leaving for a trip, my neighbor brought over a few odds and ends from her fridge. “Can you do something with them?” she asked. “Sure,” I responded.

This morning the body felt that it could stand for long enough, so … what was to be thrown together? From the neighbor:

  • 1/2 small cabbage
  • about 2 T of tomato paste
  • a few stalks of celery

What did I have?

  • 1/3 uncooked sweet potato
  • less than 1/2 of a rotisserie chicken
  • spinach
  • spices including Thai peanut sauce
  • coconut cream

This was the end result. A big yum! About 5 servings. A full meal unto itself; and it could be served over rice, as well.

Method (play on the fly!)

  • Coarsely cube the sweet potato and set cooking in a small pot.
  • Place large saute pan on the stove, ready to receive items as they are chopped.
  • Put a tablespoon or so of coconut oil in the pan (which has no heat yet).
  • Chop 3-4 stalks of celery – put in the pan.
  • Chop 1/3 head of cabbage, removing the thick round center pieces as you chop. Add the cabbage to the pan. (I say 1/3 here because most cabbages are larger than what was given to me. I used all of the 1/2 small head.)
  • Chop up leftover chicken. Skin is fine to add. No bones. A white or light colored bean would be a vegetarian alternative. In the pan it goes.
  • Turn on the heat to medium. After about 2 minutes, add 1/4 C of the cooking water from the sweet potatoes to help the cabbage stem. Mix it all around, turn the heat to simmer, and cover.
  • Loosely chop some spinach or similar green. Add it.
  • At the same time add:
    • 1 T or so of Thai Peanut Sauce, the tomato paste or sauce
    • and these dried spices: 1.5 t Thai Spice, 1T basil, 2t garlic powder, 1T cilantro leaves
    • the juice of 1/2 lime or 1 T of frozen limeade concentrate
    • 1/4 – 1/3 Can of Coconut Cream (not coconut milk or beverage)

Stir all this in. Cover for 5 minutes. Then, add the sweet potatoes, and taste for adjusting any spice or if more coconut cream is needed.

It took me 20 minutes total, with a handicapped body. You can do this! I had it for brunch in a bowl. YUM!

 

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Meditation: today, a peaceful day

Peace is born from within. Peace will not occur in relationships or in our minds, let alone between nations, if we have not discovered peace within. And, it is present; in all of us.

The monks walking for peace demonstrated much to the world and each of us. So gentle, so present, so simple. Let’s all discover peace within by inviting it: “Today will be my peaceful day.”

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Play with your food 5: frozen

Frozen, not the Disney movie. Did you know that the vast majority of frozen vegetables and frozen fruit are processed within 2 days of harvest? Yes. Store-bought frozen veggies and fruit are days more fresh than almost anything in the fresh produce department. How so?

Once picked. produce designated for fresh purchase is sorted for perfection or lack thereof  according to very limited criteria. (We don’t buy bruised fruit or semi-misshaped veggies in grocery stores.) Sorting and packaging the goods – that’s a day. Produce is then trucked across the country. Depending on where you live, if the lettuce came from California and you live in Washington, DC or Maine, it’s three days in a refrigerated truck. The truck delivers the goods to a central receiving location where various grocery store buyers purchase crates of goods and arrange for further trucking to their central distribution unit. Then, one more time, the goods are loaded onto trucks going to the store near you. All together, days from being picked to you picking it up in the grocery store is not less than 5 days and could easily be 8. Then, it sits on the grocery store shelves until it’s in your fridge.

Frozen veggies and fruits are processed very quickly. A little misshapen or bruised, no problem. Frozen goods are usually sold as chopped or cut in some way, so the broken or bruised is set aside for making big batch broths or jams. It is too costly to store unprocessed produce, so it is processed. The bagged frozen goods can be on the same truck as the fresh, but the frozen is already done – flash frozen almost straight from the field.

So, the truth is, if fresh for nutritional content is your desire, frozen is best. Organic, of course: for you, your family, the farmers, the soil and water.

Frozen veggies are already chopped. Yay! Some days, it’s unsafe for me to even look at the kitchen knife!

Then, there’s freezing fresh from garden for when the garden is asleep in winter. In addition to various vegetables easily frozen, this year I started freezing whole fronds of herbs in bundles for chopping into soups, legume stews, and dhals. This bundle is spinach and parsley. My favorite flavor bomb is garden fresh dill, parsley, spinach or chard, and full-size arugula. Roll them in a paper towel (bamboo, if possible), then put several rolls in one plastic bag, then into the freezer. Use as needed.

I just coarsely chop 1/3 oe 1/2 of an herb bundle and throw it in the pot. Big yum!

This can be done with store produce also. Have fun!

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Meditation: BE

Upon examination, doing can be Being. How so? If doing is harmonious with all, in benevolence to all, supportive of the well-being of all and one’s self, then doing is being. The monks walking for 180 days have shown this. They were actively doing as a manifestation of inner Being. We can, too, every moment.

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This new millennium of 2

Monks walk for peace and hundreds gather in support of the intention of world peace born from within. Forces bent on malevolence invade school yards, homes, and hospitals, streets, and neighborhoods, while thousands chant “NO MORE” and elders kneel in prayer for the cessation of abject insanity. The images could not be more glaring: old model predicated upon suppression and oppression and the new of the Now born from the innate goodness of human nature.We have begun a new millennium, a 1000 years of “2”: unity, interconnectedness, and the necessity of all to the whole. This millennium is also the herald of a new age, the Age of Aquarius. Both arise from relatedness which is as primal as a beating heart.

The millennium of 2000 will for one thousand years focus on relatedness. Other words for this energetic include interconnectedness, oneness, conscious participation, interbeing, and Presence  which is ever inter and inclusive. The following millennium of 3 will build upon this dynamic in ways probably currently inconceivable. The 2-energetic will naturally elicit empathy, relation, and intuitive, direct perception which are not only innate to all human beings but to every life form on this planet, including rocks and sand. Mother Earth is a planet of sensitive response and universal responsiveness. If one questions that, spend 15 minutes in a natural setting with its panoply of beings completely interactive and present to one another. Responsiveness demonstrates all-inclusive interbeing which will be hallmark of this millennium only 25 years begun. Yet, one might say, “the world and many of its people seem so divided.” In this regard, it is helpful to remember that the human species is the youngest on Planet Earth. We are learning; primarily learning to soften and open to the wholeness within which is a sameness with the wholeness of Life all around.

The last 1,000 years was energetically qualified by 1: single, first identifications and identity first. This energetic moved us along the line of singularity through perceptions based largely on form and behavior. This is to say, focused on the external. Several results ensued:

– we have grown accustomed to specificity and living with an emphasis on individuality expressing as person, community, nation, me and mine, plant identification, microbe naming, and so forth. A fundamental issue is fomented with a focus on specificity: separating, not seeing the forest for the trees, diversity as an rich expression of Life’s wholeness, and thereby not valuing the interconnectedness of life which requires each and every member even if yet unknown thus unidentified. This is not the Indigenous Way, which has forever been based on relation and honoring of all, firstly as Beings including River, Sky, and such Beings of Earth; and secondly as helpful and necessary to one another. This must be acknowledged.

– an emphasis on form almost automatically de-emphasizes the subjective fullness that is intuitively and empathically functioning always.

– both of these become the causes and conditioning factors for an ethos of take and mine which is in deference to the interconnected interdependence of life. This mindset also, like a malevolent incantation, bewilders and poisons humanity’s mind to the abundance that is everywhere, yet is interdependently fragile. Take/remove any component to have as mine and the wholeness dies. Mine/take is an aggressive mindset which we can feel this within ourself by just saying the word “mine.” The immediate contraction in our body, heart, and mind is unmistaken. “Mine” begets defensiveness.

– 1 has encouraged qualities within human beings, some wondrous and beneficial to all, some quite heinous and malevolent to all. Nonetheless, a full range of qualities and capacities are now evident in the human psyche for all to see. We go forward into 2 with this knowing born of the ongoing direct experiences of living from 1. There has been more death of all manner of beings and ecosystems by human hands and technology in this past 1000 years than in recorded human history. That is telling. Through specificity we have named particles within the quantum realm, codified plants and animals, and numbered the stars. All the while, violence is the common experience of more people than not including children and a majority of the world’s population lives in abject poverty without clean available water or proper shelter. In our world, human beings are used for slave labor, sold through human trafficking, or forgotten on reservations, refugee camps, or in prisons. Yet, humanity, through living this full range of experience and/or being witness to it, is moving on.

Unity, innate and intrinsic, now stirs within the psyche of people. Many are experiencing this inner rumble as discontent. And, if their frame of reference includes an external savior and/or a sense of privilege and entitlement, the discontent is projected out such that others are named as the source of their troubled state. Yet, no matter who or where we are, contentment and ease within are byproducts of inner unity and have no other source. The millennium of 2 will focus on this innate wholeness. Wholeness is, by nature, a unified state. As a person’s wholeness stirs, is engaged and nourished, it blossoms. The millennium of 2 will be this incremental blossoming of humanity, thus the same with all our interactions and living expression on Planet Earth.

Unity/2 insists upon sharing because interdependent is the truth of Life. Unity will undo the thoughtforms of take/mine/and aggression, of poverty, war, and harmfulness as forms of human thought, speech, or behavior. It will take time; yet each moment is one’s unique Now for wholeness of being no matter how mundane the moment seems to be.

Pupils meditating in lotus position on desk

Envision and go inward. What does inner unity feel like for you? Is it Soul alignment? Soul infusion? Devotion to God or Spirit or Beauty? What does it mean to be self-aware if self is inclusive of life and all beings and awareness is realized connectedness? Envision yourself living from your fullness, then speak accordingly, act accordingly, eat accordingly, meditate accordingly. The millennium of 2 is already showing itself to focus upon the unity of heart-mind, of walking the walk. The monks walking for peace exemplify this for us all, as well as the thousands who have come out to be with them, witness and support them. Very few are Buddhists, but all feel the stirring of innate unity and intrinsic heart-mind from which the monks live and which is within us all.

Twenty-five years into this new millennium. There’s no going back!

– part two will explore the Age of Aquarius which this current, yet new, millennium heralds.

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