It's Too Hot to Sleep

Yikes! We are having a heatwave that is shattering all NW Washington records by a longshot. It's supposed to get up to 100 degrees today. 100! Usually it's around 8o or so this time of year. I didn't get but about 3 hours of sleep last night because we had to leave the windows open to cool off the house, and many bugs got in. It was at least 94 degrees yesterday, and when I got home at around 8 p.m., the house was at 103 degrees, and that was after the majority of the sun stopped shining on it, and the fans had been on all day pulling the coolest air in.

Like I said, YIKES!

Thank the Universe we know someone with air conditioning. I'm just about to get up and pick some fresh kale for smoothies. I'm thinking kale/banana/blueberry sounds good. Maybe I'll throw a peach or 2 in as well. We have 2 strawberry-banana pops left in the freezer, so one o' those'll likely be breakfast. Mmmmmm ....

Well, I'm off. Gonna try to find a nice spot to do some raw cacao research. Naked Chocolate came in the mail 2 days ago, and I've not gotten a big chance to read it yet. Only part way through the first bit. I checked it out at the library 2 years ago, but didn't have the full appreciation of Shazzie's and David Wolfe's work then. Now that I'm not in transition and am fully raw, I see the book with new eyes and appreciation. TOO amazing! Thanks for your hard work, you two. Just amazing, I tell ya!

Ok, I'm off in search of shade and cooler, greener, less biting-bug-filled pastures ... and trying to be content and grateful for the heat and what it can bring at the same time. If you have any ideas for how to keep the bitey-buggies off in a raw, natural way, lemme know. The itching is nearly unbearable! Over 50 bites on both legs combined, and only below the knees.

I say to you YIKES!!!

A Fruity Surprise

Zowie, three posts in one day? Well, alas, it cannot be helped. This afternoon, while I was posting away about my kale, Jason, the absolute Love of my life, brought me the following:

Isn't this just gorgeous? Fresh sliced peaches, blueberries, and blackberries as big as strawberries! I am usually the main food prep person in the house (as Jay spends so much time on the back end of things making sure videos and tech-ie stuff works for the business), so I was quite pleasantly surprised to be served up such a lavish meal. And delighted! (Thanks, Lovey)

As I was about to dive head-first into the thing, he announced that he had topping for it! We've been dabbling a lot in raw coconut spread, maca and agave these days, as they seem to go so well together. Jason had simply mixed coconut spread and raw agave together and then drizzled it atop the bright fruit, thusly:

Doesn't he have the most creative, gorgeous hands? I mean ... ummmm ... uhhh ... doesn't this caramely topping look just delectable? Yeah, that's what I meant to say.

Here is what the salad looked like when completed. And the peaches tasted JUST like peach pie with that topping on them. Unbelievable! I will be coming back for more of this Scrumptious Summer Salad very, very soon! Thanks again, Baby.

Kale-o-Rama

So it has been Kale City around these parts for the last month and a half. A friend of ours, Laurie, gave me a ton of baby Red Russian Kale starts back in early June -- told me that if I would help her weed them out, I could have them! WEED, I say! It took me 3 tries to get a healthy patch going (the first 2 rounds got eaten and beaten roundly and soundly by the local slug populace -- looked more like I was growing nets than greens). But I guess 3rd time's a charm.

Each time I transplanted new kale babes, I fertilized the soil more and more and more, in the hopes of giving the plants something to eat once they were in. I think the soil was so depleted that the poor little guys just couldn't make it. The photo above is a closeup of a portion of the kale I've planted all along the left side of our house. I'm saving it up in Seal-a-Meal bags in the freezer, and am harvesting about 2 huge armfuls every two weeks. It's just amazing! My goal was to grow 1/3 of our greens for green smoothies, and I've surpassed that by a long shot! In case you didn't know, kale and spinach freeze quite nicely, especially in vacuum-sealed bags like I've been doing. And then you can just bust off a chunk of leaves and reseal the bag and pop it back in the freezer whenever it's smoothie time. The key is to make the smoothies while the kale is still frozen. Don't let it thaw, or it can become a bit of an icky thing to touch.

I've probably already got enough kale in the freezer to last us for 2 or 3 months of smoothies, and once the kale harvesting season ends (which I understand can last well into the winter), I'm hoping to have enough to last us until it comes up again next year.

I'm ADORING having all this organic bounty; about $150 worth if it was store-bought and organic. The way I figure it, I will likely save my family over $800 in greens purchases this year alone -- and that's just for the smoothies! Wait until I start getting lettuce coming up for salads! So far, I've harvested kale on 6/25/09, 7/18/09 and today, 7/26/09.

Below, you can see what the patch looked like before I harvested a ton-o-kale.

Now here is what it looked like after. WOW!

Poor little bald kale patch. But it just comes back like gangbusters every time I harvest, so I don't think I've hurt its feelings too badly. We had thunder, lightening, and a WONDERFUL ozone-scent-filled summer downpour yesterday afternoon and throughout a good portion of the night. I admit that I was getting behind on my garden watering, so the tomatoes, basil, blueberries, strawberries, sweet cicily, kale, cucumbers, zucchini and fruit trees are in hog heaven today. No matter how much I water them with a hose, they are never as happy as when they get nature's water -- rain they could soak up yesterday and warm sunshine most of the day today. You may be able to see the raindrops on the closeup shots of the kale. To the right is a shot of today's harvest. I put the clippers I use to cut the kale from its stems on top of the pile to demonstrate the size of the enormo-pile I picked. Believe it or not, there is a black 12"x12" platter underneath all of that kale! (In the background, flowering oregano, sweet cicily, and strawberries sit in planters.)

After haulin' in all that kale, all I had to do was shake it off to get the excess water off of it. Fortunately, there was so much rain yesterday that there was no need to wash it (actually, there rarely is any need to wash any of my home grown produce). I use something called Thalassa Mix from a place called Grow Greens and it has something like 92 nutrients in it. All my life I've thought that I had a "brown thumb", but now I think that thought I killed the plants with some kind of bad juju, when it was really just me not knowing that I should fertilize the holy living heck out of the soil before I started. I'm not affiliated with this company Grow Greens in any way, but I gotta tell you, whether you are growing something in the ground or hydroponically, this Thalassa Mix is THE way to go. Transplanted babies don't go into shock, harvests are 3 times more bountiful (in my experience), and the plants are so strong that they naturally keep pests off themselves.

Above is the mondo-pile put into a mondo-bag, ready for sealing and freezing.

And here it is after, with all the air sucked out of it.

It truly does amaze me how much air comes out and how much kale one can store in one's freezer. Just look at the picture below. I'm not even using 1/5 of my freezer space for 2-3 months of the healthiest, most local smoothie greens I can get my paws on! Excellent! Last, I just wanted to show how much waste there isn't when growing one's own organic food. Because my garden gets all it needs via the best fertilizer money can buy (in my humble opinion), I don't ever have to spray or douse anything with anything. I will put a little chopped-up hair trail around the base of the kale to keep the snails from crossing and participating in The All-You-Can-Eat Snail Kale Buffet, but that's the extent of my pest control. And with mulching, there's no need for herbicides, because only what I want to sprout up does. (Plus, I eat most of the dandelions, if they get into the garden.) So if you're wondering how many leaves I threw away, how much waste there was, what rotted "on the vine" or what my ratio of harvested to lost kale was, here's your answer:

Yes. That would be one single, sprouted, raw almond on the left side of the photograph. Out of all that kale, THIS is all I had to put into my compost! Not bad for one day's work! :o)

Glitch With Snickerdoodles

So I got all ready to make these snickerdoodles, and realized I didn't have any raw honey, any cashews, or access to any raw, sprouted almonds. HA! Well, at least I had the cinnamon. When the first of the month comes around, I'll be getting an order of all the yummy stuff I need, so I will post the recipe soon. Thanks for your patience.

Snickerdoodles

A friend of mine, Michael Henderson, made the most AMAZING nut/honey/cinnamon mixture that tastes JUST like homemade snickerdoodles!! The dear has given me the basic ingredients, and once I go home (I'm out) and can mix and match the ingredients, I'm going to share the recipe for free with all of you. Mmmmmm ... cookies just like mom used to make. But healthy, and with none of the gluten. :o) Look for the recipe to be up on the Go Raw, Not Crazy (on the Recipes page) by week's end.

And We're LIVE!

Very exciting day! We are at long last LIVE! There is LOTS to do still, but Jason has been so wonderful in setting up my template page and basic pages, doing my style sheets and working the html a bit here and there, so all I've had to do is flesh out the pages. The About page is up, as is the Recipes page -- I only have 3 free raw recipes up so far, but more are coming soon -- just gotta create more o' those purdy recipe cards. I'm excited to get my email list started, and to start giving away my first copies of my free ebook! Cheers! :o)