Sarah Wilson

I’m not about to venture into the food bloggosphere, but I’ve been asked to share the recipe for the muffins I took to this morning’s brunch. I’ve kind of made it up.  Apologies to all home economists everywhere…I know this might horrify you.

So, five bodgy steps:

1. turn oven to 180 or so (my oven doesn’t have a dial)

2. beat 2 egg yolks, 1/2 cup honey and some grapeseed or camelia or just plain olive oil (2 tbls?) with a stab-mixer

3. add this glug to a bowl containing a cup each of grated pumpkin and almond meal, 2 cups of gluten-free flour (I used buckwheat and some besan flour), a big shake of cinnamon, 1 tsp of baking powder, a handful of chopped basil leaves and a fistful of chia seeds.

Chia seeds are a superfood – the most nutritious on the planet, according to some. They contain 19 amino acids, stacks of omega 3 and, oh, the fibre…when added to liquid they get a glutinous coating that makes one’s bowels work somewhat smoothly.

4. then stir in enough water (I don’t really know how much) to get it to a thick consistency (I use the stab-mixer again) and stir in egg whites that you’ve whipped up a treat

5. finally, spoon into muffin trays that are lined with little squares (10cm x10cm?) of baking paper and POP into the oven. After about 5 minutes I sprinkle with some pepitas and then bake for another 10 minutes or so.

Trust me, these will work out. Don’t worry about exact measurements, so long as the consistency is cakey. Bear in mind the chia seeds soak up stacks of liqued. So if you end up with a runny batter-like stodge, add more chia seeds.

*Get fancy and sprinkle with fresh torn basil and some flowers flogged  from the neighbours garden when presenting to friends at brunch when you’re 25 minutes late.

Yum.

Another week, another installment. A month or so ago I posted my musings on my not-so-amusing journey with hashimoto’s.

This week, I’ve invited Melbourne personal trainer, BioSignature practitioner and blogger Kat Eden to give her comic – or otherwise  – input.

thyroid disease can feel like you're hovering in a pool of sludge

I came across Kat on the site Dumb Little Men and loved her tips on living life better. I contacted her cold (it’s one of my favourite things to do – contact someone I find interesting and just start talking) and found her advice very sound, especially in regards to hormones and digestion.

Over to Kat:

What causes this whole caper?

From my way of thinking, and based on clinical experience I’d say stress has to be one of the biggest players in sparking auto-immune disease. In particular chronic stress. It doesn’t really matter where the stress comes from, or even if it’s a whole bunch of little stressors rather than one great big life-changing event. Your body doesn’t separate one type of stress from another in terms of the way your nervous system and hormones respond, so the accumulation of stress can be (often quite suddenly) very toxic.

A few months back I tried out a juice detox. It worked lovely wonders.  So I decided to give Eat Fit Food’s detox a try. Theirs runs for 10 days, all the food is delivered to your door in the wee hours of the morning, it includes 3 meals plus 2 x snacks and juice and you really wouldn’t know that you’re detoxing because the food is exciting. Not drab. Every day is different. The cost? It works out as $56 a day. That’s for EVERYTHING you’ll eat in an entire day.

Seth Godin, the maestro of idea generation, posted this musing this morning about using cliches to your advantage.

be your own bridge over troubled waters

He starts with the wiki definition:

In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.

To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and re-used the type.

Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose….

The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite.

My philosophy right now: small, nice, gentle changes to the way you do things can drag you from the biggest of ruts and bored sludges. Little creaky movements to the left or right. Do-able shifts.  Like, sometimes I part my hair on the other side. Or write in a different location (yesterday I hung out at the Surry Hills library). Small, gentle shifts make life feel fresh. But keep it small, otherwise they don’t happen.

If you feel the same way,  you might want to give this little app a crack. Omm Writer is a beautiful, FREE!! download

This is a new addition to my blog – food I like. From time to time I’ll flag a new food/food discovery that does good things – ethically, environmentally and nutritionally, or just in a makes-me-happy-when-it-sets-off-a-salivary-explosion-in-my-very-being kinda way.

First up, is Loving Earth’s organic, raw chocolate (slogan: healthy, sustainable, fair). I eat it as a twice-a-week treat after lunch. It melts in your mouth and feels like a food stuff, not a guilty indulgence.

Just now I ate flaxseed tortilla chips with three anchovies drizzled – or is it draped? – over the top. And a cucumber. Which confirms the rumours: I’m an eccentric eater.

But one thing I’m rather conservative about, or at least consistent with, is my tea. Twice a day I make a pot of green “Queen Peony” tea in this teapot and drink it from this cup (cast your eyes below).

I bought the pot in New York 15 years ago; I love rubbing the little booby things. And I love that the frog makes no sense.

The cup and saucer, I found at the dump about 20 years ago (in Canberra, a company has scavenging rights at the main dump and on-sells cool stuff they find amidst the nappies and paddlepop wrapper; my housemate worked there and I got a discount!). And I’ve been obsessed with green tea for years (honestly, it gives a far more dignified jolt of energy than coffee, and it’s so good for balancing your digestion).

I find comfort in this ritual. I talked about this yesterday. I’m a bit obsessed by the value of ritual at the moment. I used to think I hated it. My mum always said I needed to tame my manic mind and restless legs with ritual and I’d tell her that sounded boring. But now I can see that it creates moments of special pause in your day. A retreat from haphazardness. And when you own it as your own, you can like yourself a bit for the quirkiness of it all.

Muriel Barbery picks up on this in her friggen amazingly astute and philosophically delicate novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. You can order it You Know Where. The main character sits down to tea:

“I know that tea is no minor beverage. When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a licence granted to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor…. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends…”

Ok, that’s enough typing for now.

Check out this new online gizmo. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows you to wipe yourself from social networking. Forever.

become as free as a REAL bird

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can strike you off Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. At the press of a button.

As the site says,  be as free as a real bird. A 2010 resolution, perhaps? To free yourself from the relentless tinkering with and preening of your social network sites?

I am very much hesitant about why I have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn presence. It all seems rather counter-intuitive to my search for simplicity and LESS in all aspects of my life.

Do you do this? Fret about finding the perfect holiday WITH A PURPOSE? Recently, I went around in 238974897 circles trying to find the best place to do a traditional Indian treatment. That’s what I do. I Over-research. Eventually the right answer pops up in front of me. So obvious. I didn’t want to travel to India. India ain’t good for us vatta types. But, it turns out, the first ever ( officially recognised ayurvedic wellness retreat outside of India is in Ubud, Bali at Como Shambhala.

Can’t sleep? This works. It truly does, in a gentle, lasting way. Gwinganna retreat in the Gold Coast hinterland is where I did mine. I can’t recommend it enough. I learnt that you shouldn’t eat grapefruit at night and that sleep cures most things – auto-immune, cholesterol problems, weight issues. Four months later and I’m still living out the tips I learned there. Aside from anything else, the place is authentic in its commitment to wellness. Some of the best healers on site, organic food, a wise old legend who lives on the estate