Everyone has got a little excited about kale. Every time I write about it I get stacks of emails. So I thought I’d post a great kale pesto recipe. Healthy as. And you can freeze it...which I’m radically into right now.

There’s a lot of recipes out there. I like this one.

1 bunch kale
2 Tbsp hemp oil
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
2 Tbsp fresh basil
1 lemon, juiced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp Celtic sea salt

Add the ingredients to a food processor and whip with an S-Blade until finely chopped.

This one for quinoa with walnut kale pesto from glutenfree girl also looks good.

I love patterns. I get a kick out of arranging the accouterments on a cafe table (sugar dispenser, fork, napkin) in lovely stabilising shapes. I’m not a neat freak. I just like patterns and seeing if things can be placed more pleasingly. Which is why I whooped when I found things organized neatly.

It simply posts pics of things placed “just so”. It’s a delightful human quirk…this need to order things artfully. And I like how certain things appeal to us more…like having a thicker border at the BOTTOM of a painting than at the top.

I like arranging rolled up sugar packets and beer labels in patterns on bar tables. You?

This week I clear for myself some space.

On Tuesday I was walking to the post box while talking to my accountant and reading an email attachment on my phone. I passed an old lady in a pink beret sitting at a bus stop. Just sitting in the sun. Fifteen minutes later, she was still sitting there, staring into space. She wasn’t compulsively filling the space with music or texting or twittering. Or, to be generationally appropriate, knitting. She kept her space a vast, unhindered void.

I’m not sure if it’s because it’s become a tired cliché, but “time poor” just doesn’t quite cut it in summing up the collective yearning these days. Instead, I’ve noticed we now all ache for “space”. Space is something my generation hasn’t had since we hung out in sandpits building racetracks for our HotWheels.

This week I played with this ache. I mean, it’s not something you can go out and buy, or bottle. You have to play with it conceptually.

It’s a risk you take walking in the street these days: will you get stopped by a fashion blogger and asked to share what you wear on camera? Mostly, it’s unlikely to happen to me. I’m not overly “fashion”.  But I got stopped the other day by Faye de Lanty from Fashion Hound and was asked to explain myself. I don’t think I’d actually showered that day…or brushed my hair!

For those interested…

* Woolen haarem pants: All Saints (I buy online…the UK store is best at the moment, given the value of the Aussie dollar against the Euro). The peep-toe desert boots I wore on Good News Week (see yesterday’s post) are also from All Saints (a few of you asked).

* Glasses: from the flea markets in Hong Kong ($15)…If you’re in Hong Kong, stock up on lenses and frames. Cheap as them chips!

* Single-speed bike: built with my mate Reuben. The details are here if you’d like him to build you one.

Not sure if you saw it… I was on Good News Week on the Ten Network on Monday night. It was a bit of an election wrap-up. I had a lung infection. And stupidly took a “night” cold and flu tablet. So I was strung-out-dopey all night. Who does that?? I actually don’t remember much of the night. Apart from being stupified by Akmal and getting choc chips down my bra.

Here’s the links (I like how this first one paused on my “Yeah, right, as if elephants fly” expression):

TBH, it was one of the most terrifying things I’ve done. I live in fear of being asked to 1. dance 2. sing 3. do a Theatre Sports-like performance in public. I ran a very real risk of this happening. I ran to the loo all day.

Also – I’m not funny. I mean, I roll with punches and have a good sense of humour, I reckon. But I don’t do gags. In my head I do. And often they’re really bloody funny. But I think my outward awkwardness means the execution will always be dorky. The timing is not syncopated.

Yep, all of the above. I love them all. They are an injection of happiness. My body actually smiles when I have them. Same with zucchini, oddly. And brazil nuts.

It’s funny-but-totally-get-able: because all three are great sources of antioxidants, I have a very healthy attitude to all three. I don’t binge on them. I don’t obsess about them. I just really, really enjoy them, consuming them when my body feels like them. It’s amazing when you back the fork off something, you can feel clearly what is best for you, hey!?

Antioxidants basically stave off the oxidization process in the body (which damages cells and wreaks cancerous, aging and inflammatory havoc). Bloody welcome relief for anyone with autoimmune disease – we can actually benefit somewhat from consuming antioxidant foods.

Just some random factoids I came across this week:

Chocolate:

Chocolate  is good for you…until you eat it every day: the evidence continues to grow that the stuff is good for you—but only, natch, in moderation – 1-2 times a week. Here’s the thing…the same studies found daily doses have a negative effect on the anti-inflammatory processes in your body.

Green tea:

* Green tea really is greener: it’s carbon footprint is much less than a cup of normal tea or coffee. FYI, while we’re on the topic… when boiling water for tea, bear this in mind – if you boil more than you need (as most people do), you could easily add 20g to the carbon footprint of each drink. Also, How you boil the water makes a difference too. The least expensive and most carbon-efficient way to do it is to use an old-fashioned stove-top kettle on an appropriately sized gas hob. This is greener because inefficiencies in our power stations and distribution systems make electricity a relatively wasteful and high-carbon way of producing heat.

Red Wine

* If you eat red meat, drink red wine . Neither are great for you if you’re inflammed. But a girl’s gotta live. Like really live. Mercifully you can sin all at once and do a little less damage. Protein softens the wine’s tannins, and red wine also helps counteract potentially harmful substances — oxidized fats called malonaldehydes, or MDA — released when meat’s digested.

The lovely Clare Lancaster at Women in Business posted this interview with Gwen Bell, one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Tech, 2010. It touches on some really great points, including how to get mindful for the day…. for everyone out there feeling like they’re doing too much, which is sooooo a theme this month. Too much, all layered up, swamped, drowning….and not doing things with heart and care.

Don’t know about you, but I’m BUSTING to come home to myself.

Last month Gwen unplugged, she did a digital sabbatical – no blogging, tweeting, Facebook or email for 31 days. Clare spoke to her about it and got some really lovely, poignant answers. For the whole interview go to Women in Business, a site for chicks doing it online. PS Clare is a GREAT web strategist, offering e-courses on how to build an e-businesses…e-hah!

And bear in mind this: Gwen experienced her most profitable month during her sabbatical.

Gwen on: how when you grow up you have to enforce your own breaks…

When we were students, someone enforced breaks. You’re taking the summer off. You’re taking the winter break off. School is closed during those months. Load up on library books and prepare for self-study. Because the library will be closed, too.

I think our entrepreneurial selves are like students, without those enforced weeks off.

This week I learn The Art of Slow Reading

I’ve never been a big reader. Even as a kid. Which has always surprised people who assume that just because you wore glasses with an eyepatch for 18 months (when I was 12) and spent lunch in the library means you were a bookworm. Truth be known, I only ever got as far as Double Love in the Sweet Valley High series.  Which I suppose doesn’t really say much in either direction.

As a kid, if Mum caught us reading it was code we weren’t doing much and she’d hand us a basket of nappies to hang on the line. A resting heartbeat in a child would get her antenna up and she’d swoop in with a bundle of kindling to start the fire. So we stayed outside. And avoided the brown questions in Trivial Pursuit.

That was my excuse then. Now, like everyone else it would seem, I blame the internet. Recently much noise has been made by many angry experts claiming the internet is making us stupid because it forces us to read too fast, skimming tidbits at the expense of absorbing nourishing knowledge. In his new book The Shallows, tech guru Nicholas Carr uses neuroplasticity theories to argue this hyperactive toggling is reshaping the pathways in our brains, rendering us incapable of absorbing complex insights and arguments. Let alone follow a family tree in a Tolstoy novel.

Is this the toughest election in history to get excited about, or what? It’s been lacking in defined policies and been brimful of watered-down, negatively-defined, wavering visions on both sides. It’s flaccid soup. And I haven’t been able to find the chunky bits!

A few thoughts before I head to the ballot box tomorrow.

I’m choosing to find the heartening and true path in it all…because I believe there is one, under the spin and limp performances:

* This flaccid soup has meant the Greens have emerged as a viable third option – a sturdy crouton, if you like – for the first time in history, in the running to control the Senate and get their first member in the House of Representatives. They have a clear, unwavering vision that something can stick to. They are an injection of kind (their income tax changes, for example), a reminder of where we all REALLY want to be. It’s going to be a good injection to have in the mix, no matter whether you agree with all their policies….keeping the bastard’s honest and all that. I’m glad they’ll be around.

* Despite the fact that whenever there is a dire absence of substance we resort to a personality contest, we haven’t in this  case. Because both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott left theirs at the starting gate. This rather breaks my heart to watch. They’ve been stage-managed within an inch of their lives. And they both got too far down this corralled path to be able to get true in time for tomorrow’s ballot. I get the sense they wanted to. But exhaustion and micro-management has prevented it.

Both leaders have also been operating too close to the screen. They’ve been sitting in the front row and wondering why they’re missing the plot.

Have you ever been in that position…where you have so many people telling you what to do, and so many competing factors are up close in your face, that YOU get lost in the pulling and tugging?

I found this post on Lifehacker about how to be a great host replete with really clever free download. I thought I should share it because it’s really rather efficient. And sweet.

I personally get pretty uptight when guests stay. Having new people in my space confronts me. I live a pretty selfish life and I get all flustered when my routine is mucked about (mostly because I have no “fat” in my schedule…something I’m desperately working on right now…for another post). When friends and my large family step into into my home it kind of breaks my stride. Which sounds revoltingly ungenerous, I know…

That said I always put out flowers – daphne is a favourite – in the spare room, place a towel and facecloth on the end of the bed and bust my foof-foof valve (as my grandad used to say) to show them a good time. Lifehacker suggests we all go one step further and they’ve created a Guest Information Pack template you can download for free.