The Chocolate Covered Diet

If you like simple, delicious desserts, have a look see at Chocolate Covered Katie. The impossibly adorable chef, photographer, blogger is a bit of a genius at whipping up desserts (and some savoury dishes) that copy popular ‘conventional’ versionss but with healthy ingredients that significantly reduce bad fats and sugar.  Recent posts include Chocolate Frosting Shots made with coconut milk and a to-live-for cinnamon coffee cake’ish sort of deep dish cake made with a large can of beans instead of flour (that one’s for you Rosanne .

Oh and the recipes are also vegan but don’t let that scare you.

Enjoy!

A Year of Change

Happy New Year!  I hope you enjoyed the holidays and apologize for my dearth of posts.  I intended to write after Christmas to tell you about my husband’s family’s eco-friendly way of wrapping gifts.  Over the years they have accumulated a closet full of festive bags and prewrapped boxes of all sizes which they pull out every year and reuse.  Fast and simple.  Even tissue paper and gift tags get recycled.  Garbage following the big day is restricted to a few plastic tags or shrinkwrap from CD’s, movies and the like.  Giftwrapping our presents is fun, simple and stress free.  I highly recommend it.

The reason I haven’t been posting here is that my writing time has been devoted to the book I have started.  My working title is “Food Allergies – A Parents’ Guide”.  My friend Lesley challenged me to do this years ago but at the time I wasn’t ready.  Looking back I don’t think I had the confidence to believe I had enough to say.  Her suggestion did though motivate me to start this blog and for that I am grateful.

Why the book now?  It feels like the right time.  I now feel like I know what I need to say, who I need to say it to and how to deliver what I’ve learned.  With increasing frequency I am being asked how to deal with allergies.  Just last evening my cousin emailed to ask if I would talk with friends of his who are, in his words, “lost and confused” after finding out that their four-year-old is “allergic to everything”.  I’m looking forward to talking with these parents, hearing the specifics of their situation and sharing suggestions that I hope will give them confidence to deal with their new reality.  That is really what I needed four years ago – information and reassurance that everything would be O.K.  I was fortunate to have cookbook author Lisa Lundy and our Naturopath, Robin, to lean on.  Now its my turn to pay it forward and do the same for others.

I promise to post here as often as I can but in the mean time, take care and stay green!

Marci

 

 

 

Whole Foods

I love Whole Foods.  If we lived closer (we’re almost 50 minutes by car to the closest one) I would soon become one of their organic fixtures.   Yes it’s pricey so I can am careful about what I buy there.  But for the prepared foods section alone I am grateful.  There aren’t many restaurants where a gluten free mostly vegan eater can actually find choices on the menu.  And their perfect organic shade grown swiss water process decaf is pretty swell also.

One of the best things about treking almost an hour to the periodontist for my recent gum surgery, was discovering a brand new Whole Foods located literally 5 minutes from the office.  Always a silver lining.

On our most recent visit we were delighted to find that they have Christmas trees and Chanukah bushes that have not been sprayed with herbicides.  I had searched locally and come up empty handed.  Prices are comparable to conventionally raised live trees and we were able to bring home a petit little potted tree that now stands proudly as our first Chanukah bush.  Speaking of which it is time to light the first candle.

Happy Chanukah!

A Silver Lining

Three weeks ago I had gum surgery.  Pretty extensive and fairly painful for a few days.  I expected the pain and was proud of myself for not making a major dent in the two! bottles of painkillers that were prescribed.  I was also prepared to take a course of antibiotics and I did.

What I was not prepared for was this sore throat, cough thing that has been hanging around for the last 5 days or so.   When it continued to worsen over the weekend I promised myself I would see the MD today.  He said I wasn’t ‘presenting’ like someone with strep throat but did the swab nonetheless.  My biggest concern at that point was that I would need yet another course of antibiotics.  This concern I shared with the doctor.

When he returned five minutes later, culture results in hand, my face lit up as he shared the diagnosis.  My doctor laughed and said that this was a first – a patient thrilled to hear that she had the flu (and would therefore not need antibiotics).

Thar’s Change Afoot My Friends

Went to Lowe’s Friday evening to do some research about Christmas trees.  I regret to report that there was no positive news on that front.  However I did become part of a suprisingly uplifting conversation.  Once the salesperson realized my bent toward the clean and green if you will he proudly told me how his wife has him drinking organic green smoothies.  Spinach and kale work he reported but chard is just too bitter.  ”I added a pear”, he said.  ”Then a banana, then yet another apple”.  ”Still bitter.”

I laughed andd nodded and was in the process of suggesting my secret weapon – a heaping tablespoon of  cinnamon – when another shopper who had stopped and was listening, chimed in to share Dr. Oz’s green drink recipe.

I came home, Googled “Dr. Oz green drink” and tried it today.  I halved the recipe and added extra lemon and ginger and the result was indeed delicious – refreshing and densely packed with nutrients.  Gave the old Vitamix a better work out than my traditional grees/apple/cinnamon and water smoothie.  A nice change indeed.

So thank you to Greg and the mystery shopper for turning an otherwise depressing fact finding mission into proof that the good word is spreading.

 

 

More* Words I Never Thought I Would Say…

“I baked pie”.  But I did.  Thanks to Lisa Lundy’s no fail crust recipe and Zack’s help in rolling out the dough,  I assembled and baked a pie. Gluten, dairy and egg free.

Even after almost four years of baking without these ingredients I am still dazzled and amazed when my baked goods turn out.  But pie?  I never imagined baking one period, let alone a version like this. But it actually looks and tastes like pie.

For the filling I mixed together sliced gala apples, cinnamon, lemon juice and sucanat.  Simple.

We made it for dessert for the dinner to celebrate my inlaws’ anniversary.  Everyone enjoyed it but the kicker came when my father-in-law, who is more of an eat to live rather than a live to eat fella, actually accepted my offer to take home the remnants. This meant the world to me.

In fact I am so jazzed that I am attaching a first ever photo with this post.

This is the pie – BD – before dinner.

Had to learn to do the attachment also – but hey, if I can make pie…

Can You Say e-x-p-r-o-p-r-i-a-t-i-o-n Boys and Girls?

This morning after breakfast our son was sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with the crepe paper flowers he made me for Mother’s Day last June.

“Remember I made you these flowers, Mummy?”

“Of course I remember.  For Mother’s Day.  Those are my favourite flowers, Zack”.

“I’m taking them back”.

“You can’t take them back.  You gave them to me”.

“I can take them back.  I’m the GOVERNMENT”.

Ask Not What Your Coffee Grinder Can Do For You – Just Use It!

Coupla weeks ago I ended up at the dentist with a red and swollen spot on my lower gum.  Yuck.  The dentist’s hypothesis was that I scratched my gum and the cut had become infected.  Before I could verbalize the question “how the heck had I scratched it?” I knew.

A week or so earlier my 12-year-old coffee grinder had suddenly bitten the dust. Undeterred, I used my new toy – the grinding attachment of my shiny new KitchenAid immersion blender – to grind buckwheat for some raw cookies.  Said attachment created, not flour, like my now defunct grinder, but jagged smaller pieces of buckwheat.

“Oh this will give the cookies a nice crunch,” I thought to myself.  Nice crunch indeed.  Even whilst eating those delicious little suckers I knew they were trouble. I’d bet dollars to gluten-free baked donuts that is how my gum became injured.

The moral of the story is that if you need to grind seeds, nuts or any other sort of grain into a flour-like powder, bypass the fancy grinder and go straight to an el cheapo coffee grinder.  My new one cost 15 bucks and completely pulverized and decimated both buckwheat groats and flax seeds this afternoon.

Enjoy!

 

An Exciting New Artist!

Dear Friends,

I hope you have all had a wonderful summer.  Mine has been busy hence the dearth of posts over the last two months despite the list of topics that tempts me. I am proud to say that it took a special person to motivate me to get back to it.

My cousin Dave is a very cool guy.  Without going into details, let’s just say he is an inspiration.  A trained chef, a diligent law student (at Dalhousie Law school in Halifax), just the sweetest guy, and now, I find out earlier this week, via CBC radio no less, an artist!

His work is original, interesting and eco-friendly to boot.  He takes broken bike parts, cleans them up and creates sculptures of beauty that serve practical, functional purposes.  This young man never ceases to amaze me.

You can see for yourself at Dave’s Bike Art Stuff.

Way to go Dave!

Water, Water, Everywhere

Our son, Zack’s, grade 2 class just finished a water study.  Each water use i.e. brushing teeth or washing dishes was assigned a specific amount of water for each minute of the activity.  Running the dishwasher or the washing machine was deemed to use a set number of gallons.  The children were required to keep track of what went on in their respective homes each day for one week.

At the end of each day they added up the household’s total water usage.  At the end of the week they came up with a grand total of gallons used during the week.

Notwithstanding my lack of enthusiasm for having to report how many times we flushed the toilet each day, I thought it was a great concept and hoped the project would inspire the children and their parents to look at their water consumption and consider ways to conserve.

Sure enough Zack’s teacher, Lisa, told me that feedback about the project was positive and that many parents were now talking with their children about using water more carefully by, for example, turning off the tap while washing hands and brushing teeth.

My hat is off to you, Lisa.  This was a great idea and I hope other teachers adopt this project and perhaps even expand it to include electricity…

P.S.  Zack sat with me while I wrote this blog and wants you to know that he was jazzed to report our daily toilet flushes