That the economy is tanking.

I’ve been swimming lately in the Pacific ocean.  Even writing those words, I sigh…

My friend Lou and I go down to the beach a couple of times each week.  When we get there, we talk on the sand for a while, downloading our respective days, and then one of us says “Shall we?”

Lou has a certain way with the water; he runs straight at it, yelling “it’s warm!” to himself–and anyone nearby–before plowing headfirst into a wave.  The yang approach.  I, on the other hand, let the cold sting of the water electrify the soles of my feet first.  In that moment, when my nervous system shouts its first of many “Holy Crap!”s, everything becomes wonderfully still.  I smell the salt.  I feel the suck of the undertow at my heels as I tip backwards in the sand.  The glitter of the sun on the water almost hurts my eyes.  And then I see the foam.  The lovely foam.  A smile fixes itself on my face like I’m five years old.

I approach, excited yet cautious. The legs aren’t hard to submerge, until the mid-thighs.  That’s where the fat is tender and sensitive.  And the crotch–oh God–what is it about hitting the Lady Mound with cold water?  It’s almost nauseating, but once it’s done, it’s done.  All good.  My midriff offers little argument, but by the time I’m negotiating some medium waves, and my chest is their prey, I resist again.  It feels so wrong to have the breasts and heart slapped with icy, angry walls of water.  Lou yells from far away “get your head in!  It’s not good until you’re under!”  And he’s right.  Once I’ve surrendered it all…I’ve surrendered it all.  And it is good.

The ocean doesn’t know about Lehman Brothers.  She hasn’t heard George Bush’s warning of imminent economic collapse.  She has absolutely no interest in the price of oil and she certainly won’t be watching the debates.  I love that about her.  She’s just there, bigger than all of us; bigger than any baseball stadium or skyscraper we could dump in her… bigger than all the countries we are standing on, freaking out.  Although she might seem like a cold, moody bitch at times, she’s really just setting the rules.  Setting the real rules.

The ocean is a place of weightlessness.  Isn’t it nice to have a place to float, when everything feels like it’s sinking?  Do something free today.

Here’s a picture of Lou:

P.S.

My friend Christy is a macro cook here in Los Angeles and she’s giving a series of cooking classes coming up.  If you live in the area, check them out at: http://vivalagreens.com/cookingclasses.html

Here’s one her recipes:

Sweet Polenta Porridge

Ingredients:
3 cups filtered water
2 pinches sea salt
1 cup organic yellow polenta, washed
1/3 cup organic soy, rice, or almond milk
1 Tablespoon organic sweetener, more or less to taste
1 Tablespoon organic raisins
Dash of organic cinnamon

1 cup organic walnuts, chopped

Directions:
1.    Bring water and polenta to a boil in medium saucepan with sea salt.
2.    Simmer, stirring frequently for about 10 minutes until polenta gets thick and creamy.
3.    Stir in almond milk, raisins, cinnamon, and sweetener to polenta.
4.    Stir over low flame for a few minutes to incorporate the ingredients.
5.    Toast walnuts in skillet over medium flame until fragrant. Be careful not to burn the
nuts. Sprinkle over porridge.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under My Life, Photo, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sounding like a weird cat lady… I love cats!  They’re just so cool!  I remember having an argument with a dog person once (and I like dogs, but I’m just not a dog person, per se), and in defense of the superior feline, I challenged: “What could be better?  A cat is like a furry pillow, makes this awesome noise while it vibrates, never needs to be walked, cleans itself… and.. could it get any better… (drumroll…drumroll)… SHITS IN A BOX !!!”  IT’S THE PERFECT PET!!!!!

I was frothing at the mouth at that point, due for my rabies shot.

I don’t wear my cat-love on my sleeve for fear, being single these days and over 22, that I will be perceived as a pathetic old cat lady.  AS IF HAVING 79 CATS IN A SMALL APARTMENT IS WRONG!!

Just kidding.  I have two.  As of last week, I introduced 3-month old George to 5-year old Pepper.  He’s a rambunctious tabby who doesn’t know yet that an ankle is neither a chew-toy nor a scratching post .  Pepper, needless to say, has been pretty ticked off by this interloper.  She finally relaxes when he takes a nap, as below, all upside down with his legs in the air:

All the stress of becoming a second-time cat-mom has made me crave peanut butter cookies.  Although I’m not the most original chef,  I have a knack for stealing recipes and adding my secret je ne sais quoi.  In this case, I’ve stolen a peanut butter cookie recipe from Meredith McCarty (an amazing chef and cookbook author in Northern California–check her out) and added Vegenaise to insure maximum fat and yumminess content.  This recipe is NOT for those on the healing diet.  Sorry!!

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 to 1 cup unbleached white flour
1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons aluminum-free baking powder
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 cup light vegetable oil
1/2 cup peanut butter, crunchy or smooth
1/4 cup Vegenaise
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350F.  Line two baking sheets with parchment or brush with oil.  Mix dry ingredients, adding lesser amounts of flours and baking powder for small drop cookies and more for bigger cookies that hold their shapes.  Whisk wet ingredients together and add to dry to form a smooth batter or dough.  Transfer wetter dough (less flour) to baking sheets by heaping teaspoons or, for perfect shapes, roll that amount in your palms to make balls and flatten somewhat.  For firmer dough (more flour), measure in 1/4 or 1/2-cup portions with ice cream scoop or measuring cup and shape into balls.  Either way, press tops with a fork in classic crisscross design.  Bake until bottoms are golden, 12 to 15 minutes.

Down, George!!  Ow!!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 10:16 pm and is filed under My Life, Photo, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

After my book came out, I received an email from a woman named Janice Taylor.  She had just written a book called Our Lady of Weight Loss and it was about to be published by Penguin as well.  In her email, Janice was looking for advice on promoting her books, tips on what to do, and just general chick-support as she experienced her author’s loss of viginity.

Little did I know that I was dealing with a powerhouse.  Janice needed absolutely no advice on promotion because she has a PR gene; her website (at the time) had 6,000 regular visitors (surely more now), her book was absolutely beautiful, funny and inspiring.  Janice, my friends, is a very hip chick.

We finally met a couple of months ago in New York City.  After sitting and chatting with her and her lovely husband in their Manhattan apartment for about an hour, I declared “I don’t care what you think, we’re going to be friends for life!”.  And we will be.  Sometimes you just know.

Janice has a blog on beliefnet and she’s quoted me this week’s entry.  Please check it, and her, out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So I’m just sitting in my apartment, minding my own business when a “Jessica!” comes from outside in the garden.  It’s dark, so I can’t see who it is very well, but when I open the door, I am greeted by nothing less than a macro god.

He’d be incredibly embarrassed to know that I’ve written that, but it’s kinda true.  It’s sort of an open secret among macro women that everyone has had a crush on Mark Hanna; he’s good looking, supernaturally cool, has traveled everywhere, and can whip up a 7-course meal for 600 with his eyes closed.  What girl wouldn’t want to come home to that?  Plus, he’s a great advertisement for the cause–although he has passed his half-century mark, he looks about 35 and ready to hit the next surf board that comes along.  Here’s a nerdy pic of him cooking for the Taste of Health Caribbean Cruise.

Unfortunately for all the single macro ladies, Mark is married to wonderful woman and they live in Belgium most of the time–he’s just in L.A. on a cooking job.  So we sat and chatted for a while… it’s very interesting when two macrobiotic people get together; there is a specific language used that would seem so strange to an outsider–yin and yang, biological degeneration, Sarah Palin being “so yang”.  We talked about the late Bill Dufty, who wrote Sugar Blues, the great anti-sugar tome that’s been in print for over thirty years.  Mark knew Bill well and even traveled with him long distances in his truck when Bill was in his early 80s.  Mr. Dufty would just sit, arms crossed like a tribal chief, spilling the stories of his life.  Stories of his late wife Gloria Swanson, J. Edgar Hoover, Billie Holiday, even George Ohsawa.  He had a very, very big life.  By talking to Mark, I felt like I was reaching back into the past through a door that had almost disappeared.

Life is big.  And it’s short.   Eat well, find yourself, have fun, and every once in a while, eat Mark’s Chocolate Cake from his book Greens and Grains on the Deep Blue Sea.

Really Rich Chocolate Cake

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

2 1/2 cups unbleached white flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 cup canola oil

1/2 cup soft silken tofu

1 cup maple syrup

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 1/2 cups soymilk

1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

Easy Chocolate Sauce

Yield: 1 1/2 cups

1 cup grain-sweetened chocolate chips

1/2 cup soymilk or rice milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

To Make the Cake:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Oil and flour a 9-inch springform pan and set aside.

2. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a large mixing bowl.

3. Place the oil, tofu, ample syrup, vanilla soymilk, and vinegar in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.  Add to the flour mixture and stir until well mixed.  Pour into the prepared pan.

4.  Bake about 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.  Cool 15 minutes before removing the sides of the pan.  Cool completely before adding the sauce.

To Make Sauce:

1.  Add water to the bottom half of a double boiler and place the chocolate chips and soymilk in the top section.  Bring to water to a boil and heat the chips, stirring often until melted.

2.  Add the vanilla extract and stir with a whisk until smooth.

3.  Cool slightly before using.  Pour or spread over chocolate cake.

Variation: You can prepare this sauce without a double boiler.  Add the chips and soymilk to a small saucepan and place over low heat.  Stir constantly until the chips are melted.  Other variation: Instead of vanilla, try other extracts, such as almond and orange.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under My Life, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve been avoiding you. I’m sorry.

It just didn’t seem like I had much to say this summer, between double espressos and white pasta dishes. My mind was racing a hundred miles an hour, dashing from irritation to resentment. And when the intensity faded and the race track cleared, I was left with grief… the stinking hot tar of grief. And I didn’t feel like sharing.

In the last weeks of her life, my mother and I spoke about my future. I told her that, although I was very glad to have moved back to Toronto–that it was full of valuable, often painful lessons–I felt like a square peg in a round hole there. No matter how much I tried to wrestle Canadian culture into what I needed it to be, and no matter how much it tried to pack my childhood neuroses back into my psyche, it just wasn’t working. I didn’t fit anymore and it felt bad. My mother gave me her blessing to leave our hometown. She understood.

When I was little, I remember my mother saying, on more than one occasion “if I were ever to live anywhere outside of Canada, it would be in England. I’d like to be near the sea.” Now, it’s important to understand that my mother was a very practical person, not disposed to staring out of windows, misty-eyed, pronouncing her dreams and visions. None of us ever thought she’d actually end up in England–as far as we were concerned, it was just something that she said, like “you can’t modify the word ‘unique’” and “will you get me some chicken McNuggets?”.

But Mum was tuning into was her dream. She was receiving little flashes of it many years before it manifested fully, but it was there. And at the age of 55, after a few midlife crises and a some fruitful years in therapy, my mother–much to the amazement of her friends and family–left smug and snug Toronto and headed straight for the sea. She bought a flat in Cornwall, in the west of England and pronounced that she would spent six months of every year there from now on.

I’m only beginning to realize the courage it took for her to leave. Yes, it was an English-speaking country and yes, she had the financial resources to do it comfortably, but as I age, I understood more deeply how yang and contracted we become over time. To bust out of a safe, respectable and familiar environment and expand into the relative unknown–at 55–takes some balls. But something inside of her was pushing and pushing, and it wasn’t going to stop.*

Within a year, my dear mum, who hadn’t been in a relationship for fourteen years, met the love of her life and her plans to return to Toronto became a joke. Clearly, by following her intuition, she had put herself in the right place at the right time. The last fourteen years of her life she just got happier and happier. She discovered macrobiotics, her spirituality and her life became a dream infused with love from every direction.

So I landed in California two weeks ago. It’s the place that’s been calling to me for the last five years, but if I’m really honest with myself, I’ve had a fascination with it since I was a child. I’ve lived here once before–for a few months–and every time I’ve been here I have felt more myself, and more aligned with my work in the world than I do anywhere else; macrobiotics and hypnosis are practically mainstream in Southern California, and a huge percentage of hits on this site come from this hot, shaky, celebrity-dotted desert. It’s not where I’m from, but it’s home. I’ve moved into an apartment in a magical bamboo forest, owned by some macrobiotic friends, Eric and Sanae, who live just next door. I’m very, very happy. Listening to that little voice inside produces a happiness nothing else can match. Although I miss my family and friends in Toronto deeply, I can hear my mother somewhere, cheering.

*For a great example of having a dream and acting on it, see Man on Wire.

RECIPE:

It’s the time of year for settling foods–foods that help stabilize blood sugar and tonify the stomach, spleen and pancreas. As summer lays down like a panting dog, our bodies need to settle down from all the expansion, in preparation for autumn’s contraction. This time of year is known as Late Summer and its foods are sweet vegetables, sweet rice and millet. Its taste is (you guessed it) sweet. The harvest is coming in and life is very sweet and abundant. So here’s a squash soup recipe by my friends, from their book, Love, Eric and Sanae:

Butternut Squash and Kidney Bean Potage

Makes 4 servings:

For the Kidney Beans:

1/4 cup kidney beans, sorted and rinsed

2 cups water

1-inch strip of kombu

For the squash soup:

1 butternut squash

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 brown onion, finely diced

2 carrots, finely diced

2 cups water

2 pinches sea salt

2 pinches curry powder

1 tablespoon white miso

1/2 cup rice milk (unsweetened)

To make the kidney beans:

1. Soak the beans in ample water for 4 to 6 hours. Drain.

2. In a large pot with a lid, combine the beans, water and kombu and bring to a boil.

3. Cover and simmer for 40 minutes, or until beans are fully cooked and still retain their shape.

To make the squash soup:

1. Using a vegetable peeler, peel the squash, slice in half, and remove the seeds. Coarsely chop the squash and set aside.

2. In a medium saucepan, warm the oil. Saute the onions lightly for a few minutes.

3. Add the carrots, squash, and water, and simmer for a few minutes.

4. Add the sea salt and curry powder. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 20 minutes.

5. Transfer vegetables to a blender. Add the miso and rice milk and puree until creamy.

6. Transfer to a large bowl or pot, gently stir in the whole beans and serve.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Living Your Dream, My Life, Photo, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.