A few posts back Julie Cowdroy wrote about the Below the Line campaign – a program in May that sees well-fed westerners live on $2 a day to experience what it’s like for the world’s poorest. And to raise $$. I promised to give it a crack and did so for a day. As, it seems, with most people who did it, I resorted to lentils.

Lentils are cheap. And Dr Weston A Price considers the little buggers the most nutritious of all legumes – high in minerals and they help assimilate protein and iron absorption. But they can be bland and horrible and really crook on the gut. If you don’t play right.

Here’s some tricks for eating them.

Just mine. It’s not a comprehensive list.

1. Add red lentils to soups and casseroles and curries…

for extra bulk and fibre and protein. A cheap way to spread out a meal. Simply rince a handful and toss in 15-20 minutes before the dish is cooked. They disintegrate and you’ll barely know they’re there.

2. Soak your green and brown lentils a few hours.

Most recipes will say you don’t need to at all because they’re quite low on phytic acid. Soak in warm water with a bit of lemon juice. Seven hours is good.

3. I make dahl…
by boiling  soaked brown lentils (1.5 cups)  in water to cover, adding a tsp of turmeric (a great anti-inflammatory), pepper and garlic. I simmer for an hour  (covered) and then whisk the lentils til creamy. In a pan I saute cumin seeds and 2 small hot chillies in butter (or ghee) and then fold that through the lentils with some coriander.

4. I sprout lentils.

I wrote yesterday in Sunday Life about going retro with my work habits…that I write out things longhand and that I’ve taken to using index cards to map out ideas before sitting down to a computer screen. It gets me closer to my creativity and slows things down to the pace at which I create and think.

By Neil Stewart

So happens I was reading David Malouf’s essay The Happy Life in The Quarterly Essay yesterday. He writes longhand, too. Then types. And he discusses – beautifully -  the idea that part of our unease, our contemporary unhappiness, comes from having so much our life occurring at a speed that our bodies are not aligned with.

He writes that it is integral to our happiness to be curious and to delve and to investigate. And that our bodies are our reference point, to determine direction.

“We start always from the body, and relate all thing back to it.”

And indeed everything about our bodies are in relation – think of Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci’s figure that shows every bit of our body is  proportional and symmetrical.)

But life goes so fast now.

“These days we can travel around the globe at hundreds of kilometres an hour and project ourselves into space at several times that speed; but in some part of ourselves we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth, lumbering along as our great-grandfathers did…at four hundred paces, and tiring.”

Yes, and tiring.

The question,  he writes, is:

“whether emotionally, psychologically, we can feel at home in a world whose dimensions so largely exceed …what our bodies can keep in view.”

Sunday Life: This week I work a little “retro”…and it worked!

via Gala Darling

A week or so ago “#RIPTypewriters” was trending. Which, for those not of The Twitterverse, means a stack of people were commenting on the death of the typewriter following news the last manufacturer in the world had closed shop. I entered the nostalgic Twitter fray to reminisce about work life pre-Ctrl Alt Delete:

Remember Liquid Paper? Remember doing actual research in a library? The metho smell of the stat machine?

The commentary, as with all things particular to Boomers and Gen Xers, was tinged saturated with a certain “see how hard we had it back then?” message to young folk. But there was also a distinct longing to it. Not for the usual “simpler times” (because they weren’t; navigating the Dewey system to check what year Tupperware was invented was not an elegant process). But for…well, this week I tried to capture what it was. And replicate it.

Turns out there’s a community of hipster typewriter fetishists out there. In March the New York Times ran a feature on Brooklyn 20-somethings who hunt down vintage Remingtons at flea markets. “Type-ins” are being held around the world (cool typers hang out in pubs and…hit the keys) and there’s an emerging “typosphere” (a blog scene for typewriter nuts). One Gen Y fan summed the appeal thus: “It’s about permanence, not being able to hit delete”.

This is just a small trick the lady next door shared with me last night. She said she focuses on following her breath when she’s anxious. Stops for two minutes. And follows it in and out.

By Anna Hatzakis

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. It’s what everyone says. But she added this:

Follow your own breath. Draw it in for you, air that’s not muddied by other people’s energy.

In that little bit of simple advice, I discerned something fresh. It’s one thing to follow your breath. It’s a super focusing technique that brings you into the present. But it’s something extra to follow a breath that’s especially for you, the you on the inside. The quiet you that sits somewhere around the lung/heart cavity where the air is drawn in. It gives the “task” an extra sense of purpose. And don’t we all respond to that!

When I focus on breathing in I feed that quiet part of myself. My inside people. Just for a few minutes.

Nice.

In other news…

This keeps coming up as a theme: listening to your gut. I remember a  few years ago being told to do this, to trust your instinct, which somehow resides in your stomach. And I tell you I had no visceral sense AT ALL what it meant. My gut? Nothing was coming from there. I got nervous feelings, butterflies etc, but had no idea how to translate these feelings to my cerebral side.

I saw this on Big Think this morning – James Marsh, who made Man on Wire, talking about it.

Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psych and author of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters came out with some statement this week that men typically lie upwards and women typically lie downwards.

He uses this argument to then highlight a point I think he’s rather proud of: the one thing that women don’t realise about their feminine power…

They actually have more of it than they realise.

He says:

It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige.  They do, because they have to, in order to impress women.  Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to.  What do women control?  Men.

But he argues:

Men pretend that they make more money, are taller and have had more sexual partners.  In contrast, women pretend that they are younger, lighter and less sexual. In a word, less. He points out (apart from height) these dimensions only increase with time, so women lie and pretend to be what they used to be before in the past, whereas men lie and pretend to be what they will be in the future.

The females of all mammalian species, including humans, always have more power than the males,