Local, Sustainable, AMAZING Wine

When I first moved here I was all about the local wines...hey, I'm in the Willamette Valley after all. However, recently I made the move to boxed wines for the shear sustainability and affordability of them. When those two worlds came together for me, of course I scooped up a box. Badger Mountain Pure Red is amazing. At first sip I was floored. This is quite possibly the best wine I have ever tasted...for the average price of $20 a box (that's $5 a bottle for you bottle drinkers). The sustainability does not stop with the box. Badger Mountain is a local-ish wine for me; 200 miles away in the Columbia River Valley (same watershed). They are an organic winery (Washington's first) who adds no sulfates to their wines. The box liner is BPA-free too! This wine is a winner, local or not, so check it out! What could be better than your pocketbook and the environment than this...if you're not willing to not buy wine that is. And if white wine is more your thing, don't worry, Pure Red has a sister...Pure White.

"The best homework anyone will ever give you"

My teacher training teacher, Corina Benner often would tell us this. We were assigned to practice 4 times a week. At the time, I did not find it easy and it was sometimes a struggle to fit in those practices 4x a week for 9 months. Boy was she right though. I only could dream of such homework now. Before I moved out of Philly to attend Chiropractic School I had a solid practice schedule. Most weeks I would be practicing 5-6 times a week. It was incredible; and I certainly did take it for granted. It was just simply the way things were. I made sacrifices and showed up to practice regularly. Fast forward to now. I wake up at 5:00 AM, rush around to get out the door and bike to my 7:30 class. School ends at 4:30 or 5:30 and then I'm biking home. Two days a week (on those 4:30 days) I head to the studio, unless my dog gets sick, which happened today, or some other obstacle pops up. Home practice is becoming more and more the norm, but it is not nearly as infused with juice and devotion because there is always a dog on the mat, or some other distraction...and more often than not I am easily pushing the practice back until it's just too late because there is always dishes or clothes to wash and of course, studying to do! The reality is that at best, my 5-6 practices a week has now slumped to 2-3 practices a week. I find myself making the same excuses that I used to hear from yogis all around me: I'm too busy, I'm too tired, there's just no time today. And I just hear Jill saying her simple answer to all of this, "Practice first." Perhaps that really is the key, but how? Sometimes the sutra-like answer needs some experimentation and explanation. I don't think I can embrace a 4:00 AM practice, but perhaps practicing first thing after getting home is something more manageable...well after the dog is walked of course. Studio days will continue to be Tuesdays and Wednesdays plus the occasional Saturday morning; but other days practice comes first at HOME. Saturdays and Sundays are going to be no exception and a practice will happen before breakfast. This lofty goal of mine does have some cushions...yin yoga is to be practiced 3 days and moon days are days off. I will be experimenting in the assigned time slot for the rest of this week. And officially kicking off on Saturday morning when I expect I'll be full of juice after Friday evening's Jayashree workshop! Please leave your pointers and advice for this lazy yogini and her lofty goals to get back to her beloved Philadelphia practice schedule. And if you see Corina, thank her for the best homework anyone ever gave me!

Kitchen Counter Local

When people talk local foods they have many definitions: 250 miles, 100 miles, metro and surrounding countryside, maybe even their own garden. But what about in your own kitchen. What possibly could be there for you to harvest and eat? YEAST! Yes, that critical ingredient for bread and beer can be found in the air everywhere, including your own house. You too can grow your own with very minimal effort. Here is the basic gist.

1. Make a yeast food mixture of half whole wheat and half regular flour.
2. Take a medium bowl (large cereal bowl should do it) and add about a half-cup or so of your blend to the bowl. Add some tepid water to make a loose dough.
3. Cover the bowl with a thin kitchen towel or some cheese cloth and let it sit for 3 days.
4. Remove the towel and remove half. Feed your yeast another 1/2 cup of 'food', and water to make the same consistency. Cover, wait 2 days.
5. Continue to remove half and feed and water daily. The yeast will grow and shrink predictably at some point. This is good behavior. If you forget to feed your 'yeast pet', it will forgive you if you get back into good habits again.

To use your yeast you can follow the recipe below to make some of the most delicious, complex, and filling breads I've ever eaten. A little dense, but wonderful. The recipe makes three small loaves, so I froze the other two. Bread making takes about a day, but it only requires that you be around for that day to monitor the situation periodically. Yeast pets and their breads are not nearly as demanding as dogs. Feed and water your yeast pet the night before bread day. 5 1/2 cups whole wheat flour 2 3/4 cups regular flour 3 cups + 1 T warm water 2 T + 1 t salt 2 T yeast

1. Add the water to a big mixing bowl.
2. Add in yeast and stir to dissolve. Floating yeast is good behavior, but it will work if it doesn't float.
3. Add in the flours. Mix with hands until there is no dry flour, this is messy business.
4. Let the dough rest for 20-40 minutes.
5. Add in the salt and incorporate by dipping hands in water and folding the dough on top of itself until the salt dissolves into the dough.
6. Let the dough rise 3-4 hours in a warm place, turning the dough over onto itself 12 times every half-hour.
7. After this rising period portion the dough into 3 pieces and shape it into fat, round discs. Allow them to rise for 3-4 hours.
8. Preheat the oven and a round casserole dish with lid to 500 degrees.
9. Carefully flip a loaf into the preheated casserole dish, lid it, put it into oven.
10. Turn oven down to 470 degrees and bake for 20 minutes.
11. Remove the lid and bake for 20-25 minutes until deep golden brown.
12. Remove bread to a towel to cool.
13. Wipe out the casserole dish and repeat the baking for the other loaves...including preheating the oven and dish/lid to 500 degrees.

Enjoy your new 'yeast pet' and the lovely gifts it gives you!

Can Do!

If you are going to eat local...eventually you will want tomatoes in the winter, something sweet for your toast, and more. Luckily, you can find good quality canned and frozen foods that are local in Portland, just go to New Seasons Market or somewhere like it. However, that stuff is a little too expensive for my tiny budget. So what to do? Can it yourself. This year I have canned a lot of foods for the year ahead: 19 quarts of tomatoes, 8 quarts of beets, ~30 1/2 pints of jam of various flavors (mostly blackberry that I can pick just about anywhere in this city for free), and ~10 1/2 pints of of tuna. Maybe next year I'll add some dill pickles to my list. Canning is serious business, and if you are thinking about it I recommend you get the 'bible' of canning and follow it's instructions and recipes (for canning practically anything)...the Ball Blue book, which can be purchased on their website for just $6. You certainly don't want to poison yourself or your loved ones by improper technique. Upfront costs of canning are sort of high. You're buying a lot of produce, e.g. my two boxes of tomatoes cost around $50. You need at least two big pots, I prefer to use my pressure cooker for the jar processing, I can use it as a water bath canner as well as a pressure canner. Low acid foods and meats must be pressure canned. And you need jars and some spare lids. The good news is jars and the canner/pots will be re-used again and again so those are one-time expenses...unless you increase production next year and get more jars; you will need to get new lids next year. A jar lifter and little lid magnet stick are also great helps. When I was just doing jam I used tongs and a big pot and it worked just fine...but it was sort of dangerous. The good news is once your operation is set up, your ready to go every year. The food costs are high, but much lower than what you'd pay for the same thing in the store. I see quality local jams at farm stands for $8 a pop...and I'm spending $25 on some strawberries to make 8-10 of the same, so the savings add up to around $30-40 over the year...depending on how much you spent on the sugar and pectin. And then there's the 'love' component. I mean, there is nothing as good as raiding your own reserves, or you gram's or mom's. The love is there, and you can't eat that from any store local or otherwise. The final drawback of canning is the reason this post is a bit less optimistic than most...the time component. Being a chiropractic student not only is my financial budget tight, but so is the time availability. Every canning experience this year, besides the jam, has cut into precious weekend time. I always underestimate when to start and ultimately decide that after a luxuriously lazy morning would be best. This results in very late nights in my kitchen. Not one of my summer/fall projects did I start before noon, and not one of those nights did I get to bed before 1:30 AM. The reality is that I only got to bed then last night because my boyfriend took pity on me and helped out at the end, most nights were until 3:00AM. I'm exhausted! I know this will all pay off in the end though. It already is. I have used the tuna, the tomatoes, the jam all before now; the beets will be pickled and ready for consumption on Christmas Day. The canner is being cleaned and put away in the closet and so are the beets this Halloween. No effort is ever wasted. Here's hoping that my efforts will inspire your own, and this year will be tastier and lighter on my checking account!

Adapting to a new environment

For the majority of my life I lived in Pennsylvania. I knew what was in season, and that included deer, trout, and sunfish as wild game. You could always find some venison in my freezer and I most certainly had some fish every summer. Now I live in Oregon and while some things are similar, but there are some new meats in my life. Oregon has a lot of fish. Salmon and Steelhead trout swim in our rivers here, and Dan went out for Steelhead, so we have some tasty fillets in our freezer. The fishing industry is huge in Oregon. The thing to do here in the Pacific Northwest is to can your own fish. My friend from Alaska canned 20 pounds of Coho Salmon from the Columbia River just on the border of our city last year in one weekend, and that included a fishing trip. After hearing about that feat, I decided it was time to start canning fish. I started this year with the most common, and cheapest, fish-tuna. This was truly an adventure. It started with a road trip to Astoria, OR around 100 miles from Portland. We went to a small fish shop and purchased a 18 pound tuna, already 'loined out'. The price was $2.09/lb. and the charge a $7 fee for the butchering job, which is just fine by me. Since we were there we fit in a hike along the coast at the most northern point in Oregon followed up with a dinner of fish 'n' chips at a brewpub. The canning was relatively straight-forward thanks to the Blue Book (an essential for any canner), the processing was long...1 hour and 40 minutes, plus cooling. Pressure canning is cool because when the jars come out they boil for a long time, and it's kind of fun to watch. Why eat local tuna instead of just a can of chicken-of-the-sea? Because it's better for you and the environment. Many grocery-store tuna cans can't compare to this, in fact we once purchased a local tuna can of 6 oz. for $8 (it was amazing). The cheap tuna is typically imported from south-east Asia, questionably harvested, full of mercury, and over-processed. My tuna came off the fishing boat and went right up to the fish shop I bought it at the night before. The fishermen use the fish waste from butchering as bait that they collect from the shop later. Not much shipping or waste there, besides our car, to do a hike/adventure that we would have done anyway. Fish off the coast of Oregon are caught using hook-and-line methods which is much more sustainable, and since the water temperature is perfect for pretty much only tuna, there are few other fish 'accidentally' caught. The fisheries are abundant and sustainably harvested. Health-wise, Oregon tuna are amazing. They have very low mercury levels, since the fish are on-average younger and have had fewer years of biomagnification. (Then again, we wouldn't have to worry about mercury levels of fish at all if the world could just stop burning fossil fuels, but that's a whole other post.) A huge benefit of Oregon tuna is their Omega-3 levels. They have much higher levels of this essential fatty acid than imported (leaner) tuna. Canning methods count too. Most cans of tuna you find in the grocery store are cooked before being processed. The cooking process makes them loose some of their oils and also their flavor. At the recommendation of the Oregon Albacore Commission I used the raw pack method. This method involved cutting up the tuna into jar-sized pieces, packing them into jars, adding a half-tsp. of salt, filling the extra space with boiling water, and then processing. This retains the natural fish oils and flavors. I hope this post encourages you to adapt to whatever environment you find yourself in, and preserving some local abundance in season just may come into play for you too.

Fall Eqinox Pizza

One of the best things about eating local is that you never really get tired of eating anything because you have it only for a short while. Just when I'm starting to get slightly weary of salads-and I still really had my fill-fall rolls in. It's cooler out now and I am looking for something a little more substantial. Last night I made some delicious pizza, which might be the best thing I ever put in my mouth. I added some sausage to please my meat-loving boy, but not too much and you can certainly cut it out without cutting out any of the deliciousness. Start by making your pizza dough, whichever recipe you love most. While it's rising make the topping. In a skillet start by sauteing one onion (cut into strips) in a bit of oil. Once this gets a nice brown color add in two links of sausage, one hot, one sweet, both local and sustainable pork, sliced into bite-size chunks. Chop mushrooms, I used cantrells and portabellos that the CSA delivered (first of the season!) and add them to the skillet along with a couple cloves of garlic, chopped. De-stem a bunch of chard, chop the stems and add them as well. Once the food cooks enough to be tender add the chard leaves (chopped) to the mix, lid it, and let the leaves steam. After a few minutes the chard will wilt down enough to be stirred in. After combining everything add a small pat of butter and stir until melted. Remove from heat. Once your crust has risen, make it into a pizza-shape, oil the crust and salt and pepper it. Arrange the topping. Shave a nice layer of Parmesan cheese all over the top (optional). Bake for about 10 minutes at 425. Obviously temperatures and times will be determined by your particular crust. Enjoy this. It's definitely worth all the love and labor.

Back to Basics-Ahimsa

Recently I suffered a pretty serious rib injury and my practice went on a hiatus. Further, it was the end of the school term here at Western States Chiropractic College resulting in increasing stress and decreasing sleep. Now I have a two week break from school and have healed enough to practice asana again. Over this break I'm getting back to the basics, the yamas and niyamas, one each weekday and practicing every day. Yesterday was my ahimsa day. I pulled out my philosophy workbook from teacher training to see how I felt about this yama when I focused on it for an entire week. We were asked to define ahimsa for ourselves, my entry read: I think that ahimsa should start with how you treat yourself. This means proper rest, nourishment, and stimulation. Secondly it applies to how you relate to the world: not being wasteful, making conscious choices about your day-to-day activities. Thirdly it is how you treat others, namely your actions, words, and lastly your thoughts about others. You should strive to be kind. Two actions that popped out at me from my week of reflection were these: proper nourishment, and find ways to reduce your workload so you can focus on the more important things. Non-violence toward myself has certainly been lacking lately with the end-of-term stress by staying up late, getting up early, and eating food that's not the best for me. My nourishment needed work. I set out to remedy the situation. For lunch I made a salad with beautiful summer squash, lettuce, spinach, zucchini, tomato, beets, and a hard-boiled egg...all lovingly delivered in the CSA box, besides the beets that my mom canned for me before the move to Oregon. For dinner I cooked chickpeas, black beans, and red beans (with the help of my new favorite pressure cooker, I highly recommend them) and made a chili with fresh green peppers and jalapenos and a can of tomatoes. Since this was a giant pot of chili...it will last Dan and myself through the week and I can focus on other important things. I love big pots of soup! Yesterday's practice consisted of tentative trials of a few asana here and there. Today I had my first real practice in weeks. I could hear Jill's mantra in my mind the whole time, "Practice in a way that you can still practice tomorrow." This is certainly ahimsa. So, instead of pushing my tight hips and newly healed chest, I modified. Instead of 10 surya namaskaras, there were 5 without one jump-back. I practiced the entire standing series, but only a few asana in the primary series. I listened to what my body was saying and just ended the practice right there with a nice long twist and savasana. Because apparently, there are only so many chatturangas this costosternal joint was willing to stand for today.