Kitchen / Garden / Sanctuary - Urban Homesteading to Nourish Body + Spirit
I have to share with you this totally awesome little salad I made up the other day! So good!!! Everything is to taste; I use roughly equal quantities of quinoa and avocado (though a little heavier on the quinoa). And we use Nama Shoyu because in our opinion it’s so much better tasting than any other soy sauce or tamari out there!
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cooked quinoa
chopped avocado
sliced scallions
Nama Shoyu raw soy sauce
red wine vinegar
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Have you ever bought brown rice crackers? They’re surprisingly expensive, and often have unnecessary ingredients and are wastefully packaged.
So I’ve devised a very easy way to make my own. We love them! They’re nice and crunchy — great for dipping, or just eating plain.
1. Purchase a package of Food for Life Brown Rice Tortillas from your local health food store. (The above 12 oz. package of 6 large tortillas was $2 at my local store.)
2. Cut the tortillas into triangular wedges or rectangular strips.
3. Arrange them on a cookie sheet.
4. They’re yummy just plain like this, but if you’d like to add salt (or any type of fun seasoning blend — Penzeys Spices is my favorite place to go crazy with seasonings!), just brush the top of each strip lightly with water and sprinkle with salt. (The salt will adhere surprisingly well after baking.)
5. Bake at 275°F for 30-35 minutes until lightly golden and crispy-crunchy (and no longer leathery). You’ll probably need to add another 5-10 minutes to that bake time if you brushed them with water first.
6. Let them cool, and then store in an air-tight container (at room temperature is fine). Done!
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Three perfectly baked brown rice chips, against a raw brown rice tortilla, so you can see the color difference.
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~ I’m once again joining Taryn over at Wooly Moss Roots in her Gratitude Sunday tradition. ~
Gratitude Sunday is a time to slow down and remember those thankful moments that graced our week. One reason I love keeping a daily gratitude journal is because it helps keep things in perspective for me. Each Sunday, I open my journal and share some of those moments with you here. If you’d like to join in, just leave a comment!
Gratitude is powerful energy. I love hearing others’ gratitudes!
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– Snowfall yesterday! Oh how I love the snow. (See how pretty it made the trees look this morning?) I visited my parents yesterday, and took a nap on their bed, all warm and cozy and wrapped up in fleece blankets. And when I awoke, it was snowing! I get a deep feeling of contentment in my soul when I’m warm and cozy indoors while rain or snow falls outside.
– The feeling of practically buzzing with excitement and inspiration lately! I have no idea why it has come on, but what a wonderful and jubilant feeling that is! I love it.
– Feeling like this illness has unearthed a beautiful bubbling spring within me, full of all sorts of wonderful things and creativity. Sort of like cracking open a geode — you have to take a hammer to it in order to reveal the beautiful crystalline shapes hidden inside. It’s so nice how good and bad always go together; with the good always comes bad… but perhaps more importantly, with the bad always comes good!
– Slowly getting our house cleaned up and organized and purged. I’ve felt quite good this week with good energy (that is HUGE!), and have really felt inspired to get our house looking better. I’m tired of having so much stuff in it.
– Crossing lots off the ol’ to-do list this week.
– Being outside with my hubby one night, taking photos. It was so frigid but it was really neat to be out and about together, doing something different.
– Writing a New Years Manifesto — something I’ve never done before. A manifesto is a declaration of intentions… how you want to live & be… things you want to keep in mind throughout your days, weeks, months. I like how it reminds me of the priorities I’ve set for this moment in time.
– That I don’t have cavities, but just some tooth sensitivity. A couple months ago I started getting zinging pain in a couple of teeth when I’d eat something sweet. I thought, Great, cavities are just what I need right now. So during open enrollment for insurance, I was struggling with whether to enroll in dental insurance in case I did have cavities. I happened to mention the situation to my mom the day before the paperwork would have been due, and her advice really surprised me and made me feel so much better! She said “cavities, no, you don’t usually get cavities there… it’s probably just sensitivity from receding gums. Try getting some of that sensitive toothpaste. And dental insurance… I’ll tell you… it’s really not worth it. It’s a racket, and I cancelled mine for this coming year.” So not only did that help me make up my mind about the insurance, but it saved me a bunch of money, and she was totally correct — all I needed was a $3 tube of sensitivity toothpaste!!! It’s so nice when things turn out like that.
– And in a similar vein, I’m really grateful that I followed my intuition to keep my health insurance after I quit my job nearly a year ago. That was a *very* smart thing. I sure have been usin’ it this year, oye!
– Airing out our down comforters on a warm day. And freshly washed bedding! Love that.
– A really nice day yesterday. Went out to have a late lunch with my parents, and we ended up lingering for a long time at the restaurant, listening to the great music, talking, eating, and watching the snow falling outside. It was a sweet time.
– F. hooking up some speakers that have been lying ‘dormant’ for years. I had a sudden thought to hook them up to our TV during a wonderful Gershwin concert on PBS. We needed an adapter, so yesterday F went out to get one, and by the time I came home, the house was rockin’ with THE most incredible speakers I’ve ever heard!!! What a treasure we’ve had right under our noses! And since the landlord wasn’t home, we flipped it to the Mexican MTV channel, cranked it up to a nice obnoxious level, and danced. Ohhhhh did we dance! How great that felt! I can’t wait till the day we don’t share walls with anyone.
– Some new (thrifted) wool sweaters to keep me warm!
– Thrift stores!!!!!
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What gratitudes have graced your week?
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It’s Free Shipping time at one of my very favorite companies, Tropical Traditions! Free shipping will save about $10-15 off your order, so it’s a good time to stock up, or try them out if you haven’t before. I really love this company’s products, and use them daily. Now through Midnight EST on Monday January 9th, they’re offering free ground-only shipping when you enter coupon code 101109 at checkout.
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Tropical Traditions has a wide range of high-quality products; here are my favorites:
Moisturizing lotion – I use this every day on my face and hands. It’s the most luxurious stuff, and very gentle since it has only a few wholesome ingredients. Definitely my all-time favorite lotion.
Moisturizing cream – Much thicker than the lotion, this is another favorite. Also great for use on face and hands.
Virgin organic coconut oil – Great for cooking, eating, and also for skin! Has a much better taste than other unrefined coconut oils I’ve tried. I just love this stuff.
Organic raw honey – This is the best-tasting honey I’ve ever had. I like to buy and taste lots of different honeys, and this one always wins, hands down. When I first tried it, my eyes got big and my mouth dropped open; it just has the most amazing taste! Quintessential, flowery honey taste. This stuff is a staple in our house!
Coconut cream concentrate – I love this stuff. LOVE it. The “format” is a little strange, because when you receive it, it will have settled out into a hardened layer of coconut oil and a layer of dried/finely ground coconut meat. You’ll wonder what to do with it at first; what I do is put the jar into a pan of simmering water and let it sit there until the contents have softened and liquefied, and then I can easily stir it up. Then, I put it in the fridge until it’s hardened again. Once hardened, you can then store it in the fridge or at room temperature (it won’t separate again unless it gets really hot in your house). I usually just eat this stuff plain, it’s so good; I break it into chunks with a knife, and eat it as a snack. Sometimes I’ll eat it dipped in the raw honey, which is a very decadent and extremely delicious snack!!!
Organic Maple Syrup — Delicious, and it’s the Grade B type, which I prefer since it has deeper flavor and more nutrients than Grade A.
Laundry Detergent – This detergent is all we use, now that I’ve discovered it. It works very well, gets the stains out, and lasts a long time, making this a very economical purchase.
Oxygen Bleach – Like OxyClean. If you need a tough stain-fighter/deodorizer for laundry and everywhere else around the house.
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Now, I’ve also tried their organic bar soap, and though it was really nice soap, Hubby and I have never seen a bar of soap get used up so fast! It was weird. It just seemed like it was gone in record time. So I wouldn’t get it again. (Though my mom has the liquid soap and really loves it.) I haven’t tried every single product that they sell…but the ones I listed above, I make sure to never run out of!
Also, I bought the Atchara once out of curiosity, and it was extremely strong (even for this vinegar lover!), and a little weird. Not quite a favorite.
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And if you’re a new customer and have never bought from them before, you can also get this Virgin Coconut Oil book, with information & recipes, for free (any time, not just today) by entering my User ID, which is 6032410. When you’re going through the checkout process and you’ve added your shipping address and phone number, you will see the question “How did you hear of us?” Just choose “Referred by a friend” and then a new “User ID” field will appear below that where you can enter my User ID. (See screen shot below.)
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Yesterday when I went to the alley to spread out some too-fibrous-to-eat winter squash seeds for the squirrels, I spotted this little prize waiting for me next to the dumpster! It seemed to say “I thought you’d never come!” so I scooped it up and back into the house we went. I surprised F with it when he got home from work — he loved it! If you get really close it has a heavenly smell, just like a grown-up evergreen. F wants to re-pot it into something larger and nicer.
I sometimes have a hard time identifying evergreens, so I pulled out my Grandma Helen’s book, Hardy Evergreens, from 1934. Helen was my dad’s mom, and sadly I never got to meet her; from what everyone says about her, though, we would have been two nature-loving peas in a pod. Anyway, it’s pretty hard to tell, but our tree might be some kind of fir (from the flattened needle shape, needle growth habit, and bud shape). At first I was thinking spruce, but the needle cross section shape suggests more of a fir. Ah well, it doesn’t really matter.
I’m not sure if it likes to be inside in the warmth… I’m thinking outside against the south wall would suit it better; does anyone have experience with these?
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Welcome to The Herbangardener! This site is dedicated to nourishing the body + spirit, backyard organic gardening, traditional foodways, and homesteading in the heart of the city. Do come along and join me!
"There's nothing more pleasurable than making things by hand, and nothing more beautiful than handmade things."
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"Only after the last tree has been cut down; only after the last fish has been caught; only after the last river has been poisoned; only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Nation Tribal Prophecy
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