NOM NOM GNOME: NETTLE BERRY SMOOTHIE

After a surprisingly long break, I'd like to announce the return of Nom Nom Gnome - simple, tasty food (with gnomes).

I'm also pleased to announce a less qualified success with nettles. The soup was edible; this smoothie is actually very tasty.

Here's how I make my smoothie:

1 C frozen berries (cherry is my favorite)
1 banana (frozen if you like it extra thick)
1/2 C your favorite milk
1/2 C yogurt (soy is ok)
1/2 C rinsed, packed nettle leaves
1/2 C juice (optional)

Just blend it all up, and drink right away! Yumm. Sweet, and not very nettley, but packed with all those vitamins and green springtime energies.

I also tried nettles in this recipe that I found for a healthy mint chocolate chip shake. It was pretty good, but I would make a few changes. Here's how I would do that:

1/3 C coconut milk, chilled
1/3 C other milk of choice, chilled
1/3 C packed, rinsed nettles (for color and nutrition)
1 frozen, very ripe banana
decent splash of mint extract
heaping tablespoon of chocolate chips (sweeter) or cocoa nibs (healthier)

Blend everything, adding the chocolate at the last minute so it doesn't get completely pulverized.

It's no milkshake, but it's not hard to drink, either.  :)

NETTLE SOUP

I have been feeling like I need to start eating better, but that doesn't come very naturally to me. I am no good at giving up junk. So, my current approach is additive rather than subtractive. I've been having smoothies for breakfast, and a lot of salads. (It's possible that they're mostly iceberg lettuce. I do what I can).

When we moved up here where it's green, we had visions of bountiful gardens. The year that Violet was born, I would sneak outside to hoe the front yard while she was asleep. I was pretty proud of myself, nursing a baby, wrangling a three-year-old, and digging up a garden plot. The seeds took off like crazy. But then, in the night, the deer came.

The next year, James spent every free sunny day down the hill, clearing dead brush and trees and digging post holes for a fence. As weeks passed, we kept counting the veggies we could still hope to plant and harvest by the end of the season. In July, we gave up.

 This year it's March and we haven't so much as flipped through a seed catalogue. We've got plants, though. These guys grow just outside the kitchen door, where they can sting us on the way to the compost pile. I guess it's time to eat them.

This afternoon I put on dish gloves and picked a bunch of leaves. I rinsed them in a colander, simmered some water, and cooked them for two minutes (just long enough to wilt the leaves and take away their sting). I was feeling lazy, so I stirred in some miso and hot sauce and left it at that.

They were OK, actually, very mild in flavor, which is a good thing for me and greens. They weren't at all stingy, but a little fuzzy, which I wasn't that crazy about. Next time I want to pulverize the hell out of them in a smoothie, then maybe try these noodles, which look amazing.

Because, there will be a next time. We have enough nettles to last all year.

Mandrake! (New Two-Color Screen Print)

 


(for sale at Etsy)

Strewing: Anatomy

River has been really into anatomy for a while, and I've been collecting related projects and links:

This paper plate skeleton is goofy, but could be fun to construct and hang.

These skeleton cookies are adorable, though. Looks like the original post is gone now, but you get the idea.

Someone recommended the Melissa and Doug anatomy floor puzzle. It has bones on one side, organs on the other. It's a little advanced for River, but he was excited to have us help him put it together a few times.

We haven't explored it much yet, but the Google body browser looks really interesting and definitely more in-depth than these other ideas.

One that River came up with himself was to take his clothes off and ask me to draw bones on him with washable marker. That was fun. We also draw bones and blood people on paper pretty regularly.

For Pittsburghers, the Carnegie Science Center has some really good anatomy and medical technology stuff for all ages in the changing exhibits.

Looking for an image for this post, it occurred to me to show him the Alex Grey books...plenty of anatomy in those paintings (like the image above).

Ayurveda Addendum - Vedic Hymn to Plants

Also, I just thought this Veda excerpt was pretty awesome:

Plants, which as receptacles of light were born three ages before the gods, I honor your myriad colors and your seven hundred natures.

A hundred, oh mothers, are your natures, and a thousand are your growths. May you of a hundred powers make whole that which has been hurt.

Plants, as mothers and goddesses, I address you. May I gain energy, light, and sustenance, you who are a conscious being...

If I were looking for something to chant in Sanskrit, this would be highly satisfactory.

Medicinal Herbs: Health Benefits of Garlic

I tend to feel like I'm just getting started with herbalism, but when I think about it I realize there are a few herbs I have used regularly for a while. At the top of that list are garlic and ginger, and I've decided to start posting about herbs with garlic because it's easier to cultivate and more common in locations like mine.

Theoretically one can grow garlic by separating a head of garlic into individual cloves, planting them in a sunny location in the late fall or early spring, and waiting for the clove to form into a whole new head after the next growing season. In our case we left some cloves in the ground for several years, and although they produced beautiful greens every year, the few cloves we dug up didn't seem to have expanded at all, so I don't know what was up with that.

Anyway, I guess I can't realistically offer any advice on growing garlic. Luckily, it's pretty ubiquitous in grocery stores, so as medicinal herbs go it's extremely convenient for almost everyone. Garlic's most popular medicinal use is as an antibiotic. It's not as powerful against bacteria as commercial antibiotics, but it has several relative advantages: it's much gentler on the body, it can be used against viruses and fungal infections (which antibiotic drugs generally don't treat at all) and it doesn't seem to create stronger, more resistant strains of bacteria, which are a major problem with conventional antibiotics today.

It is quite stimulating, and for this reason isn't recommended by and for everyone. For example, garlic isn't used in Ayurvedic or Macrobiotic cooking, for the reason that it's considered to be too unbalancing, too stimulating, and may even increase aggression. However, while too much garlic may unbalance an otherwise balanced person, it can help correct a system that's already out of balance. Raw garlic can also be kind of rough on the stomach, so I generally wouldn't use it for any type of stomach or digestive problem.

If you want to use garlic as an immune booster, try to start taking it at the first sign of illness. Eating crushed, raw, fresh garlic is the best. I would try to at least one whole clove every few hours until you're feeling quite a bit better, skipping the night if you want. Chewing it up alone is rough, even for garlic-lovers, but some methods I find tolerable include making a very garlicky guacamole or creamy dip for vegetables, or sprinkling crushed garlic on a piece of bread with hummus.

creative commons photo by Flickr user CarbonNYC

New Anima Websites

The Anima center recently unveiled an amazing new website.

This is the place where I am studying (by correspondence course) something that could roughly be described as shamanic herbalism.

I was a bit skeptical at first about what a general correspondence course in healing could offer me, since I've been a pretty serious independent student of these subjects for a while, but those concerns were quickly put to rest.

The Anima center is a wilderness preserve, retreat, and ancient ceremonial site of the Mogollon people, in rural New Mexico. The folks there are extremely dedicated, helpful, and knowledgeable, and I highly recommend them to anyone who wants to pursue alternative healing studies from an intuitive and nature-based perspective.

The fact that they offer correspondence courses and a sliding scale, which made it possible for me to actually study there, were kind of just icing on the cake. And as for the new web sites, they're great, with tons of information on their teachings. The sites are The Medicine Woman Tradition and Anima, which focuses on similar teachings from a slightly different angle.

philotaxis 1.0

this figure is an amazing geometrical pattern called a philotaxis. if i recall correctly, it was introduced to me by tait, and i have enjoyed it a great deal since learning about it, finding it in natural patterns like the seeds of a sunflower and using it in many of my drawings (some examples of which can be seen to the right of this blog).

i couldn't find any instructions for creating this figure on the internet, so here they are. draw any number of concentric circles, then divide them with any number of equally spaced straight lines, as seen on the left page. this divides your circles into a number of small, curved rectangles (sort of). start at the middle, connecting the lower left corner of each unit to the upper right corner, with a curved line. repeat this process twice for each unit, going from lower right to upper left the second time. as you can see, all the lines should come together in the center of the circle. if you draw the circles and straight lines in pencil, you can draw your philotaxis in pen, and erase the guidelines when you're done as i have done on the right half of the finished diagram.

once you get started there are an infinite number of interesting variations to try.

one thing i learned today: unicorn

a unicorn (one horned deer) was born recently in italy. thanks, tait!

one thing i learned today: brown recluse

one thing i learned today: plantain

one thing i learned today: morning glories

creepycrawlaphobia

"It tastes just like popcorn."

"Really?" I asked, without much interest.

The fried caterpillar, with its shiny white body and pointy little legs, certainly didn't look like popcorn. But I had come this far. I had to try it.

I was on a self-imposed voyage of discovery. When my first husband left me after less than a year of marriage, I knew that I needed to do something adventurous for myself. We had been planning a trip around the world for that summer, and since I didn't have anything better to do, I decided to take the plunge and go by myself. So far, things were going well. I had navigated Japan for a week with about five words of Japanese, and in Australia I had conquered my crippling fear of flying by signing up for a skydiving trip. I had made it this far, but there was a reason I'd saved the bugs for last.

Maybe it was that millipede that fell into the claw-footed bathtub with my sister when I was about six years old. It must have dropped from the ceiling, but as far as I was concerned, it might as well have come from the fiery depths of hell. Before my mom could scoop it out with a kleenex, I watched in horror as its creepy body and disgusting legs writhed in the water. Bugs were everywhere, I realized, and they could strike at any moment.

I had a nature magazine with a caterpillar on the cover, and although I liked the magazine, I more or less refused to touch it after that. The cover image pretty much confirmed my suspicions -- in the close-up shot, the diabolical nature of the squirmy intruder was all too clear. Those garish extra "eyes" were supposed to ward off predators? Well, I certainly didn't want them within a mile of me.

I'm not generally a squeamish person. I'm always excited to see a snake up close or in the wild, and my first thought about house mice, bats and the like is generally that they look cute and cuddly. I'm usually even fine with ants and flies, bees and the occasional spider, and I tend to be surprised when people have a big problem with them. But I'm convinced that anything with more than eight legs has it in for me personally -- so much so that even today I have an almost uncontrollable impulse to scream and hurl things across the room if I suddenly encounter a particularly vivid picture.

Moreover, I had been a strict vegetarian for a number of years. If I couldn't even eat a delicious cheeseburger, why was I considering eating this thing? But I had to do it, I told myself, if I wanted to be free of my phobia. I took a deep breath.
It did taste like popcorn, kind of.

I lived.

But years later, when my baby son pointed and gurgled at a fuzzy caterpillar for the first time, I had to suppress a shudder and a creeping feeling of horror in the pit of my stomach.
The bugs are back, I'm afraid, with a vengeance.

100 awesome things

in honor of my 100th post, here are 100 awesome things in semi-random order. some of these things i have mentioned before, some are new; none are perfect, but all inspire within me at least a little bit of wonder. enjoy!

1. free schools are run by children.
2. cosmic trigger is a fun, mind-bending book by robert anton wilson.
3. critical mass promotes biketivism.
4. pandora plays free music like the music you like.
5. spirits play beautiful music through forward kwenda.
6. worms eat your garbage (indoor composting).
7. sweat lodges and baths are a worldwide tradition.
8. hempcrete is easy, hard and sustainable.
9. the salivation army sounds totally insane, in a mostly good way.
10. canoe sailers recreate ancient nautical voyages.
11. audrey kawasaki paints women on wood.
12. miracle fruit makes bitter things taste sweet
13. precious metal clay lets you sculpt silver jewelry.
14. send your paper cranes to hiroshima peace park.
15. find something for dinner at tastespotting.
16. love it or hate it, you can't escape burning man.
17. there are lots of ways to wear your baby (i like the tibetan).
18. localvores eat local.
19. rooibos tea is so good (and healthy).
20. poppy tea is surprisingly legal.
21. this is the best basic pen ever.
22. laugh at the daily show and colbert report online.
23. my mother wears combat boots is a decent book about parenting.
24. fermented foods are also healthy and delicious.
25. tom brown teaches survival and healing in the apache tradition.
26. nausicaa is my favorite miyazaki/studio ghibli movie.
27. derrick jensen's language older than words is depressing but beautiful.
28. quetzalcoatl gets my nomination for god of the moment.
29. painting on masonite revolutionized my art (and it's eco-friendly).
30. crows feature in many spiritual traditions, and they're smart too.
31. travel the world with lonely planet.
32. american apparel is fun and sweatshop free (though creepy).
33. may day is one thing anarchists and pagans can agree about.
34. 2012. is the world going to end?
35. natural dyes can be amazingly colorful.
36. peace silk is made without killing the worm (vegan? freegan!).
37. labradorite is an amazing stone. you should look at some in person.
38. vurt is one of my favorite novels. psyberpunk?
39. jacques derrida will make your brain explode (in a good way).
40. hot air balloons -- so steampunk it hurts.
41. lol wasteland is pretty funny if you like lolcats and/or t.s. eliot.
42. ancient rune poems contain the original interpretations of the runes.
43. molecular gastronomy is weird, awesome food.
44. these people are having a zero impact environmental year.
45. nata de coco in the strangest canned dessert ever.
46. visit alex grey at the chapel of sacred mirrors in new york.
47. then eat at my favorite (gourmet, vegan, korean) restaurant, hangawi.
48. or, the musee d'orsay in paris has a stunning art nouveau collection.
49. and the sanctuary, in thailand, is a great place to relax on the beach.
50. sock dreams has more types of socks than you can imagine.
51. zafira and baraka mundi are two fantastic tribal belly dance troupes.
52. wildcrafters forage for wild food plants. learn your herbs first.
53. you can build a harpsichord, or a theremin. (theremin? theremin!)
54. earthships are beautiful, permacultural homes.
55. bicycle powered chocolate. what's next? bicycle powered soap and gyms.
56. interested in fasting? the master cleanse is pretty simple (mmm, lemonade).
57. drums, drums, drums, drums, drums!
58. mushrooms just might save the world.
59. this guy kind of defies description.
60. these smart people have good ideas about making stuff better.
61. birthing from within seems to get a lot of things right.
62. the sivananda companion to yoga is serious but approachable.
63. don't tell me you haven't heard about the planet earth series.
64. waldorf toys are simple and beautiful.
65. these vegan brownies don't suck. no, really.
66. folkwear makes a dizzying array of historical and multicultural patterns.
67. gouache rocks my world.
68. if you're in pittsburgh on a tuesday, you can silkscreen anything for $5!
69. orchids are so beautiful and diverse.
70. the miss rockaway armada intends to raft down the mississippi, awesomely.
71. the rosetta stone makes learning foreign languages really easy and fun.
72. the ruckus society trains activists to do direct action.
73. accupuncture is amazingly successful at treating addiction.
74. spoonfed makes magical resin pendants.
75. i thought the wonderful movie the prestige was somewhat overlooked.
76. food not bombs will feed anyone.
77. hashisheen: the original anarchist agitators?
78. i can't help it, i really like gogol bordello's gypsy punk.
79. this american life is a fun, quirky talk show.
80. dan savage answers bizarre sex questions in his podcast.
81. ana voog's tree octopus may be the coolest hat ever.
82. tom waits invites you to make it rain.
83. nobody knows how banksy does it.
84. make magazine tells you how to do stuff.
85. someone built a hobbit house.
86. 'skineart is sometimes inspiring.
87. the infoshop anarchist faq is decent.
88. howtoons. what a cool idea!
89. i love low tech solutions.
90. i wish (super cheap) megabus would come to pittsburgh.
91. 'tis the season for plant graffiti. try seedballs and moss art.
92. rumi: everyone's favorite sufi.
93. according to some, the lakota nation recently declared independence.
94. kiva borrows from the rich and lends to the poor, interest free.
95. xocolatl, food of the gods.
96. i am a paperbackswap addict.
97. twin oaks is a 30 year old, self-sustaining 100 person commune.
98. you have nearly reached the end of the internet.
99. but james has to make it into this list somewhere.
100. and, umm, river. yep. let's look at that chocolate face again.

lunar calendar

i just came across this lunar calendar that i made a couple years ago. instead of a calendar month, every page is a lunar month, so there are thirteen pages. there are certain things i really like about this design like the round shape and the way the month is divided into phases of the moon instead of weeks. unfortunately, it was pretty hard to read. i'm still intrigued by the concept though, and may try to design a better one for next year. maybe if i start early...

hooray, hooray, hooray!

we started moving in today, and i am so happy! we don't have to live in a tent anymore (it's been almost two months, so this is extremely welcome news).

anyway, i still didn't have time to make anything of my own to post, so i thought i would add something about seed balls. this website tells how to make them and talks about using them for your garden. personally i think they have very interesting guerilla gardening possibilities, particularly if you use indigenous plants from your area or anything edible or medicinal. you just make up these balls of nutritious soil and seeds, throw them wherever you want, and wait!

oyster mushrooms!

if you have some, sautee them with olive oil, and enjoy a delicious snack.

or, use them to colonize the waste products from an oil spill or landfill, break down the petrochemicals completely, produce lots more oyster mushrooms, and then sautee those with olive oil and enjoy a delicious (and nontoxic) snack.

mushrooms are really amazing. even excluding their controversial visionary uses, the various species have an incredible amount of untapped potential in terms of ecological cleanup and wholistic health (we even know someone who believes that he cured his stage four cancer by taking medicinal mushrooms). they are also really interesting in terms of their biology, which is not even very well understood by modern science. for one thing, a single mushroom organism can be extremely large, and produce a whole lot of what appear to be individual mushrooms. plus, wild mushrooms are really tasty.

i think that i would like to try to forage or grow some some time.

oyster mushrooms!

if you have some, sautee them with olive oil, and enjoy a delicious snack.

or, use them to colonize the waste products from an oil spill or landfill, break down the petrochemicals completely, produce lots more oyster mushrooms, and then sautee those with olive oil and enjoy a delicious (and nontoxic) snack.

mushrooms are really amazing. even excluding their controversial visionary uses, the various species have an incredible amount of untapped potential in terms of ecological cleanup and wholistic health (we even know someone who believes that he cured his stage four cancer by taking medicinal mushrooms). they are also really interesting in terms of their biology, which is not even very well understood by modern science. for one thing, a single mushroom organism can be extremely large, and produce a whole lot of what appear to be individual mushrooms. plus, wild mushrooms are really tasty.

i think that i would like to try to forage or grow some some time.