Necessity’s Child

When you’re living life in the fast lane, it can be hard to consume your produce fast enough. I suspect that many people have had the experience of pulling what used to be a head of lettuce out of the fridge, only to find that it has turned to a bagful of black slime when your back was turned.

While nothing can save your lettuce from eventual disintegration, there is a way to buy yourself a few extra days of viable greens to eat.

Here’s the trick:

1. Give your greens a bath and a drink before storage.

Soak the head of lettuce in a basin of cold water for ten minutes or so, then upend it fro a few more minutes in a colander or dish drainer to let the excess water drain off. This will plump the cells, and the leaves will be nice and crisp when you’re ready to use them. It will also help to rinse off any pesticides or germs that may have ridden home on your food. (Add a little lemon juice to the rinse water, if you like, to help with the cleaning process.)

2. Wrap the lettuce in a cloth or paper towel, before you put it into the plastic bag in the fridge.

The cloth absorbs any excess water, and allows a little air to come between the leaves and the plastic, preventing the anaerobic bacteria from getting to your produce before you do.

A head of Romaine lettuce, treated in this way, will last beautifully for up to two weeks in the fridge.

Keep in mind, though that all food is more nutritious when consumed fresh.

Buy it/prep it/eat it!

Have you ever tried to spot a bird in the bushes, or up in a tree, fruitlessly scanning the foliage for a tiny silhouette that looked so like a leaf it was virtually invisible?

Me too. But one magical day in the park, I had a zen-like experience that changed everything.

I taught myself to Birdwatch like a Yogi.

Here’s how: Find a location where  you can hear some birds, and where you can sit or stand comfortably, facing their leafy screen, as well as you can judge.

• Relax. Feel the breath in your body, and allow yourself to become quiet and calm.
• Let your eyes’ focus grow soft and broad, as if you were just seeing with your peripheral vision, rather than focusing on any one thing.
• Bring your gentle attention to your ears. Imagine they are two huge, sound catching plates, facing out to the sides, and angled a little toward the front of your head.
• Imagine that your nose is a pointer, guided by the input from your sensitive sound catchers.
• Let your neck relax.
• Let your head drift on its axis until your nose is pointed toward the source of the bird song.
• Keeping your focus broad and soft, allow yourself to notice movement in the foliage. These are the birds for which you seek. You should be able to see and follow their movement among the leaves, and even track individual birds.

Watch the birds - aren’t they wonderful?

Why does this work?

This method works for several reasons:

1. When you let yourself go quiet, your body language is less predatory, and prey animals are less likely to choose evasive actions, like screening themselves behind a tree trunk. This by itself raises the odds of a successful sighting.
2. If you have two ears, you have Bifocal Hearing. This allows you to tell what direction something is approaching you from, but we generally use it only in an unconscious way, or let the information from the eyes overpower messages from our hearing.
3. Your eyes have two main modes of seeing: the Central and the Perepheral.
   1. The Central mode of viewing is the one we primarily use in modern living.  It is based within a small central patch of the retina, and dominated by the Cones, which see color and detail in sharp focus and allow you to read, or watch TV. This mode is almost completely useless for finding a leaf-shaped bird among thousands of leaves, although once you do find a bird, it is helpful in noting details and determining species.
   2. The Peripheral mode makes up the outer three-quarters of your retina. It is mostly Rods, which are sensitive to movement, overall pattern, and subtle variations in light and dark. When you allowed you eyes to go to a soft-focus mode. you temporarily turned down the Central vision and allowed the Peripheral mode to come to the fore. This tuned out irrelevant detail, and allowed you to see the cues of motion and shadow that indicate the presence of a bird in the foliage.

   All of these methods together allow you to use your familiar senses in what may be an unfamiliar way, and the Yoga-based, meditative approach helps you to stay open to seeing the unexpected. Instead of looking where you think the birds ought to be, you see them where they are. This is the essence of science, and where beauty lives.

I recently came down with a flu - or a cold - chills, fever, chest cough, muscle and joint aches - eugh!

So I turned to my latest bible - The Dr.’s Book of Food Medicine.

As might be expected, it recommended the ingestion of large quantities of Vitamin-C (1000 milligrams a day), and hot chicken soup, which has actually been scientifically proven to help break up congestion and boost the immune system!

Another well-known suggestion was to eat lots of garlic, however, studies show that you would have to ingest a whole bulb per day - even roasted, I think that would be too much for my stomach!

but there are some less well known suggestions:

Eat Stonyfield Farm yogurt! Stonyfield Farm yogurt is made with Lactobacillus Reuteri. Scientists think that this bacteria may help to prevent viruses from binding to tissue.

Eat avocados, watermelons, asparagus, winter squash,okra,oranges, tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, cantaloupe, strawberries and peaches. All of these are good sources of  “a compound called  glutathione, which stimulates the immune system to release large numbers of macrophages, specialized cells that sieze viruses and mark them for destruction.”

Drink a glass of California Pinot Noir every night. Reversatrol, a compound found in red wine, has actually been shown to stop influenza cells from replicating. Why California Pinot Noir? out of a panel of 11 red wines, the California Pinot Noir was found to have the highest levels of reversatrol.

Want to clear out your stuffy nose and chest congestion in a hurry? Mix a 1/4 teaspoon of ground cayenne pepper into a glass of water and drink it. This will provide you with a dose of a compound called capsaicin, one similar to decongestants found in cold and flu medication. My sister’s friend Sue puts hers into a shot glass, and downs it like hard liquor, complete with table pounding. I prefer to make a soothing (if intense) broth drink : to 12 oz. boiling water, add 1 clove crushed garlic, 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper, 1tsp vegetable or chicken bouillon, and a teaspoon of lemon juice. I sip it slowly, until I have drunk it all up!

Also, check http://pattygale.blog.com/2009/11/03/avoiding-the-flu-naturally/ for her herbal tea to prevent a flu from taking hold in the first place!

As a muralist and scenic painter, I get a lot of paint on me; and I’ve learned some valuable tricks for getting it back off again - both oil based and acrylic latex.

Here’s the trick: Paint doesn’t stick well to an oily surface, so :

• Before you start painting, slather any bits of your skin that might get painty with skin lotion. You don’t have to leave it gooey, just rub it in well, as you would to prevent dry skin. If your skin is well moisturized it won’t absorb oil paint, acrylic or solvents, and you start off ahead of the game.

After the painting’s over: Oil will lift off  paint, soap will lift off oil.

• Any kind of oil will work - from “Lubriderm”  to olive oil. Rub in a good generous dollop, and prepare for step two…
• without first rinsing off the oil, rub on a generous dollop of liquid soap - any kind - dishwashing liquid, Murphy Oil Soap, Dr Bronner’s, the hand soap in the bathroom, and so on.
• Rub the two together until you get a sort of whitish lather, and then rinse off with warm water. This should remove 90 to 100% of the paint from your skin: and you’re clean in seconds!

Still not totally paint free?

• Take a bath with a cup or two of Epsom Salts dissolved in the water.

I have had even stubborn primer roll off my skin in an epsom salt bath, with a little help from my washcloth. I returned to work the next day to hear horror stories of people trying to remove the stuff with brillo pads and harsh chemicals. Epsom salts are cheap, safe, and available in every pharmacy. They are also effective in treating sore muscles, a nice side effect!

*do rinse your hair with clean water before getting out of the tub. The salt can make your hair feel stiff and funny.

What you should know: Paint thinner is toxic!!! Never use it to get paint off your skin! the same goes for denatured alcohol, mineral spirits, turpentine, gasoline, acetone and lacquer thinner, all of which I have seen people smear onto their skin in order to remove paint after a job.

If you look at the label on the can, you will see that most of these products are known carcinogens, some of which cause nerve damage and birth defects.

And yes, since you ask, I do know long term scenics with nerve damage, no sense of smell, and one unfortunate woman whose child was born retarded. She had an unplanned conception, and worked through her pregnancy. There is also a fairly high ratio of painters in my field who have died from emphysema. Don’t push your luck!

Ok, the rant’s over. I yell because I love you.

My sister Patty Gale is a veritable font of information, and she offered these tips on picking a really luscious pineapple.

Check out her blog at http://pattygale.blog.com to learn about how to choose safe and beneficial cosmetics.

Here’s the trick:

• The pineapple should be  firm, but not rock hard, and heavy for its size.

• The skin should be golden rather than green, but as the pineapple ripens from the bottom up, it’s alright if the top is green.
• The leaves should be dark green, indicating freshness, not yellow or brown. If you pull on one of the inner leaves, it should come out easily.
• Smell the bottom - the stem end. It should smell sweet and delicious, not fermented.
• There should  be no squashy or moldy areas.
• If you find an otherwise lovely pineapple that doesn’t seem quite ripe, store it on its side on the counter for a few days. laying it on its side will help the ripeness travel to the leafy end of the fruit, where it tends to ripen last. Don’t wait too long!

What you should know: According to my copy of  The Doctor’s Book of Food Remedies by Selene Yeager and the editors of Prevention, the pineapple is not only a terrific source of vitamin C, it also contains an appreciable amount of the trace mineral Manganese, which your body uses to make collagen, present in skin, bones, and connective tissue. As a further benefit, it contains the enzyme Bromelain, which has been proven to have anti-inflammatory benefits, especially for arthritis, colds and soft tissue injuries. To obtain the benefits of the bromelain, eat the pineapple on an empty stomach, otherwise the enzyme gets used to help break down proteins, its other function in the body.

Whether you’re an axe murderer, a paramedic, or perhaps simply the average woman, sometimes you have to remove a spot or two of blood from your clothes. (or someone else’s… bwa-ha-ha-ha- sorry.)

Most people know to start with cold water, but did you know about these additional techniques?

Here are the tricks:

If the blood is fresh: The most perfect solvent for your blood is your own saliva. Just put a drop of spit onto the spot, scrub it around, and use a clean, dry cloth to absorb the stain, follow with a rinse of cool water.

If the blood has had a chance to set up: prepare a basin large enough to completely immerse the garment. Put the garment to one side.

For each gallon of liquid required to cover it up, add 1 cup of epsom salts to 2 cups hot water, and agitate until it has dissolved.

Fill the basin the rest of the way with very cold water. You want the solution to be cold. Put the garment into the water, scrubbing the stained spot, to work the salty water into the dried stain.

Allow the garment to soak in the salty water overnight.

Dump out the water, rinse the garment, and check the stain.

Repeat if necessary.

Wash with cold soapy water, but don’t throw the garment into the dryer until you are satisfied theat the stain has been removed, because heat will set the stain permanently!

This method works most of the time, even on Blood that has had days to set up.

There’s no reason ‘Freddy” can’t have a nice clean wardrobe!

Happy Haloween!

Cursing has been shown to to release tension, and to heighten comeraderie in the workplace, but there is one drawback. It emphasizes and gives weight and authority to your negative emotions. It is my opinion that those negative emotions can be spread and made to last longer  when you make a lot of noise about them.

So how do you acknowledge your emotions, and gain that sense of comeraderie that can be engendered by swearing, without spreading a lot of negative emotions around?

Here’s the trick: Say something silly.

Instead of bull shit, say bullfeathers. Instead of damn it, try dag nabit.

The more obscure and ridiculous the words, the better. Will you sound like a fool? Maybe. But you will also accomplish a few  things:

• you will release your emotion
• you will distract your own attention from your pain/ anger/frustration
• you may get a chuckle from your co workers

Humor has been shown over and over again to be a powerful force against negative feelings. A good laugh will lower your blood pressure, raise your overall mood, and even derail a fight.

A really ridiculous euphemism can even start a silly swearword competition among members of a team - the best one I ever came up with was “Dozens of Daffodills!” Which was very effective at raising a laugh when said in my most Pollyanna voice while working on a construction site full of big strong men.

I say the world needs more fools - and I’m willing to lead the charge! Won’t you join me?

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get home so tired I can barely put one foot in front of the other. Thinking up a decent meal can be almost too much to face. I don’t want to rely on ready made food, though, which is often loaded with salt, fat, and bizarre ingredients of suspicious origin (what, exactly, is ‘modified food starch’ anyway?)

My husband and I came up with a simple solution that doesn’t involve a lot of elaborate meal planning, a major time investment, or ninja-level cooking skills.

Here’s the trick: We put our heads together and came up with a half-dozen easy meals that could be prepared from the basic ingredients we buy every week, and posted them on the fridge.

Our list this month reads:  salad every night

• pesto & noodles
• omelets and toast
• spaghetti & sauce
• rice pilaf
• baguette and assorted cheeses
• french toast

If by some freak of luck, one of us has a little extra energy, we make something more elaborate or demanding, but on those nights we come home exhausted, we just pick something off the list, make it and a salad, and know that we haven’t let ourselves or our bodies down.

I like to use my teakettle to make tea, and I like to pour the scalding water over the teabag, as I believe tea made this way tastes better than tea made by sticking a cup of cold water into the microwave, with a teabag in it, and heating it ’till the water boils. Many of my friends and relations, though, value speed over flavor, and do it the other way.

I never really thought about it, until one day when I made tea for myself and a friend, and she made a surprised comment about how quickly the water in the teakettle boiled. I suddenly realized what was going on.

What you should know: Water absorbs energy at a constant rate, whether you heat it in a microwave, on a conventional store, or over a campfire. More water will take more time to heat than less, every time. The key to heating water quickly is to only heat as much as you need. Many people think water heats faster in the microwave because they typically only heat a cupful, if they’re making tea or coffee, whereas if they’re using the teakettle, they’ll fill it right up to the top.

“But”, you say, “who wants to have to get out a measuring cup every time they want to make a cup of tea?”

The answer, of course, is no one. Luckily, I have figured out a simple way to bypass that step, and still get the right amount of water in the kettle, every time.

Here’s the trick: You can use time to measure the amount of water you pour into the teapot, which will allow you to heat only as much water as you will use.

Decide on a standard amount of water to use as your gauge. I use two cups, which gives me enough for a 12 oz. mug, plus a bit extra for a top off, and to allow for evaporation.

To start, take your kettle, and turn on the tap as if you were going to fill it in the normal way. Notice how far you turn the tap, and how fast the water is running. We are creatures of habit. You probably use this same gesture every time you turn on the water, if you’re not thinking about it.

Turn the water off and grab a graduated measure big enough to hold your chosen amount. I used a two-cup measure.

Turn the tap on in your usual way. Now put the measure under the stream and  count how many seconds it takes to fill up to your desired amount.

In my case, it takes 5 seconds to run two cups of water into my measure - or into my teakettle. If I have company, or want to make more tea, I just count the requisite number of extra seconds to allow for the right amount of water.

Two cups of cold water, heated in the enclosed space of a teakettle, heats to boiling in under three minutes, about the same time it takes to heat it up in a microwave.

No wasted water, no wasted energy, and I get to hear my teakettle singing in the morning, instead of the insistent beep of the microwave. It is an improvement on every front!

I owe this useful tidbit to the summer my younger sister Kari spent working as a cook’s assistant in a nice hotel in Maine. Thanks, Kari!

There’s nothing more disappointing* than cutting into your first melon of the season, only to find that it is hard and flavorless, or past its prime, the flesh flaccid, grainy and inedible, with a winy smell that tells you the sugars are beginning to turn to alcohol.

So here is a surefire method that will allow you to choose a truly wonderful cantaloupe with panache and elan:  as an added bonus, it makes use of  your  newly discovered and fine-tuned sniffing skills. **

Here’s the trick: Pick up a likely looking cantalope , and turn it over in your hands.

1.It should be heavy for its size, and firm, but not rock hard.

2.The “netting” over the outside of the skin should be a pleasing light golden color over a pale peach: if there’s green beneath, you’re holding an underripe melon, and it will be flavorless and hard to scoop.

3.Find the round indentation  where the stem attached the fruit to the plant, and inspect it for signs of mold or mildew. Either one is a sign that it has possibly been in storage for longer than is good for it, and it may be pretty funky.

4. If the stem end is green or a little brown, press your finger gently into the depression, it should be a little soft, but still firmish.

5.Sniff the stem end. It should smell sweet and yummy!

If the melon passes this 5 point inspection, you have a winner on your hands, and may  buy with confidence!

P.s. if the melon isn’t quite ripe enough, you can store it on the counter for a couple of days. It will ripen a bit. When it is truely ripe, though, it should be eaten immediately, or stored in the fridge.

It will have the best flavor if served at room temperature.

*Ok, there might be things more disappointing than that, after all this country was moronic enough to elect Bush, Jr. to the presidency twice, but still, it’s pretty darned disappointing!

**see How to smell a flower -or- Would a Rose by any other Nose smell as sweet?