You Are What You Eat

"You are what you eat" - if this is true, then - influenced by Gourmet chef Deanna - I must turn into something dark green, fishy soon ;)!

But really, what we eat become the building blocks for our bodies.

...beings arise from food
food arises from rain...
Bhagavad Gita

I have two rules when it comes to food:

• it has to taste good
• it has to make me feel good or energize me
  

Tuna

Oh, that's what a cast iron pan is for! Note to myself: need to get a cast iron pan... More fishy goodness with onion, blood orange and dill.

This Day is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life

You need beyond eagle eye-sight to be able to read the writing underneath the Cafe Marcella sign in Amsterdam -therefore I spelled it out in the title - but I felt it to be an appropriate post for today. Today is the first day of spring (yeah!) and it's the first day of the year in Iran (don't feel bad, if you didn't know that it is Iranian New Year today, I just found out too).

Enjoy this first day of the rest of your life!

Orion - The Hunter God

Today I want to tell the story of Orion. Orion is a star constellation. I can see him in the early night hours of a clear night, hanging out in the southern skies.

That's what he'd look like through a telescope.



Orion is the Hunter god in Greek mythology. Supposedly, he was a really good hunter and after a successful mission of killing some beasts on behalf of the King, he got a little carried away and boasted: "I will kill all the wild animals on the Earth!" Scary, eh?



----- * -----

Thankfully Gaia, the Mother Goddess, Goddess of the Natural World, understandably thought:" This Orion Guy. He shouldn't say things like that. I hear arrogance. If he does, what he says, it would be a catastrophe. I have to act fast."



Gaia sent one of her animal friends on a mission to kill Orion: Scorpius, the Scorpion. The mission was accomplished successfully. None of Orion's weapons proved to be useful. He was stung to death by Scorpius.



Gaia's reward to Scorpius' successful mission was a placement in the stars. The other gods, who were sad about Orion's death also dedicated a star constellation to him - far away on the other side of the skies though, to prevent another conflict.

A story that is thousands of years old.
But the situation sounds familiar....


Sources:
http://www.awitness.org/column/wrath_gaia_orion.html
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mythology/orion.html

Do people ever laugh at you? You might be on the right path...

Image Credit: Bob Row

All truth passes through three stages:

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 - 1860)

winter shadows

winter shadows, originally uploaded by Wild R Annie.

Prairie Grass II

Prairie Grass II, originally uploaded by Wild R Annie.

by the Glenmore Reservoir

Fish Eye Lens of the Coffee Drinker

Nutloaf a la Marcie

I have had the honor or luck to be surrounded by great chefs lately. Marcie is one of them. And her nutloaf (which mysteriously doesn't contain any nuts) is one of my latest addition to the family of recipes I can make. Thank you for sharing the recipe, Marcie!

Marcie's variations are in brackets. I can also never stick exactly to the recipe (my variations also in brackets - like this (AW:...)). Especially now, that I know my food sensitivities after doing a muscle test:

cow dairy, soy, and vinegars are on the no-no list. Thankfully butter and apple cider vinegar are exempt. Annie-how, I have digressed, here is the recipe. Enjoy!

Voracious Vegan Pate aka Marcie's Nutloaf

• 1 cup onions, diced
• 5 mushrooms, diced (I add ~1/2 c more potato and skip these) (AW: I used sweet potato)
  
• 4 cloves garlic, diced
• Splash olive oil
• 1 c raw sunflower seeds, ground (food processor or blender)
• ½ c flour (AW: I used spelt flower)
  
• ½ c nutritional yeast (AW: I used kamut flower and 1 can of chickpeas)
  
• 2 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• ½ tsp dried sage
• ¼ c kelp powder (I have never used this) (AW: I used Nori Nori Seaweed)
  
• 1 ½ c water
• 3 Tbsp Braggs (I use soy sauce) (AW: I used sea salt)
  
• 1 c potatoes, grated (AW: I used sweet potatoe)
  
• 1/3 c olive oil
• 1 habanero pepper, seeded and minced (optional) (AW: I don't fool around! I used 1/2 a chipotle pepper WITH seeds)
  

Preheat oven to 350F. In a medium saucepan, sauté the onions, mushrooms, and garlic in oil on medium high. In a large bowl combine the ground sunflower seeds, flour, yeast, basil, salt, thyme, sage, and kelp. Add the water, Braggs, potatoes, and oil, and stir together. Stir in the sautéed vegetables and optional pepper and mix well. Spoon mixture into a lightly oiled 9” pie plate (or loaf pan, or small casserole dish). Bake 45 minutes or until centre is set and browned (for pate), a bit longer for loaf. Chill thoroughly before serving (for pate). Makes 4-6 servings of pate.

New York, New York

I briefly visited NY a few weeks ago. I did what most New Yorkers do: worked like a dog, stepped onto the streets and wave down taxis, and ate great deli food. A few photos are on flickr.

Ecuador Rocks

In Ecuador trees have now rights too. Ecuadorians rewrote their constitution in 2008 and included a chapter on rights for nature.

Article 1 reads: Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
....

and Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

Read more here.

Photo: Flickr

I bet this Ecuadorian stick grasshopper is happy about the new constitution too!

January 20 2009

Glasspiel

What's your walk score?

- Check out this website: http://www.walkscore.com

- Type in your address, and find out, how your neighbourhood scores in walkability.

In case you decide to move someplace else, this might be a good decision tool!

In my perfect life, walking would be part of my lifestyle. I would LOVE to be able to walk to work, walk to the grocery store, walk to the coffee house etc. But lately - many degrees Celsius, snow, darkness, distance to work, etc. have kept me from walking, cycling, really doing anything outside during the week (and I am pretty good at making up excuses...).

Photo Credit: Flickr

Off to go for a walk on a beautiful, sunny, warm Saturday!

Chris Jordan

I discovered photographer Chris Jordan's website a few days ago. These photos are from his exhibition "An American Self Portrait -Running the Numbers". His stunning art portrays American culture through the lens of statistics.

- 28,000 42-gallon barrels, the amount of of oil consumed in the United States every two minutes (equal to the flow of a medium-sized river).

Light Bulbs; A zoom in towards the 320 000 Light Bulbs, which equals residential electricity wasted (due to bad wiring, electronics in sleeping mode).

Plastic Bottles - two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. Designed for a useful life of a few years, if that. Made from a material that stays around for hundreds of years (unless it gets incinerated whereby it releases toxins). That doesn't sound like the smartest product design to me.

A detail from "Prison Uniforms". 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world. And some of the prisons are private, for-profit businesses.

You can check out more of his photos here. Enjoy!

Miracle

There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

Merino

Sheep like this guy in the picture are my dear friends this time of the year. This morning the thermometer displayed chilly -29 degrees Celsius.

My survival tip? Merino Wool from head to toe. It keeps me warm and dry on chilly days like this:

Icebreaker Socks
Patagonia Wool Top
MEC Merino Light Weight Long John's

You can go to Patagonia's footprint chronicles to see what it takes to produce their merino wool top (select Wool 2 Crew). Its journey starts with Merino sheep in New Zealand, the fabric is then made in Japan before the product hits stores in North America. I appreciate Patagonia's effort to bring some transparency into their supply chain and to report the sucess stories as well as the areas that can be improved. I wish more companies would do that.

Stay warm...

Amazon

One of my goals at work this year is to write a paper on "Certified Wood" - shedding some light on what the Forest Stewardship Council is all about. So I have been reading lots about forests, causes for deforestation, I found out that logging is just one small part of the problem. Forests converted into agricultural uses, to produce for example soy and palm oil for food production and biofuel and cattle ranching are even bigger threats to the Amazon and Indonesian forests (the 2 deforestation hotspots globally) than logging.



I have also learned that civil rights violations go hand in hand with deforestation. Millions of tribal people call the forests their home, so when the forest gets destroyed, so goes their home and their life style. Check out the video below for a visual refresher of our rights. And please send me some focus energy, so that I finish the paper soon.

kANNAda Day

Here are a few pictures from yesterday's Citizenship celebration. Now I am officially a dual citizen. One step closer to becoming a global citizen :)

Jamie and Jen in the first picture, Kurt and Deanna above showing their support by sharing a smile. The judge also commented on sharing smiles: it appears to be one of the traits that are expected from good Canadian citizens...

Nervous Annie - a few minutes before the big moment.

The Officials

Vik - wearing the traditional Maple Leaf Bindi and Malynne

Karen, Brit and Rebecca. More pictures on Vik's blog including a bonus video and check out flickr! By the way, all the Canadians in these pictures got an "honorary mention" of the judge for their good cheering performance!

Some suggestions for future improvements to the ceremony, such as adding guys dressed up in beaver suits to the event, came up over breakfast, but overall the ceremony was well received by us.

Sculpture in Downtown Calgary - honoring the Dinosaurs, I believe. We are grateful for all the lovely fossil fuel Calgary thrives off.

And as gifts are appropriate for a once in a lifetime situation as this one, I couldn't resist treating myself to a Patagonia Down Jacket. Super toasty and super light weight - perfect winter jacket for "climatically challenging" Canada - as the Judge called it. I chose their new color "Espresso", which according to my recent color consultation is a good color for me (I am not surprised - with that name - it must be a good color for me).

A bientot!

Spoonfed

Last weekend I went to Leona's Do Be Clean Open House, where we were also spoiled with soup.

Carmen served her home made soups, which she also delivers in glass jars around the city. Served with yummie dill crackers. If you are Calgarian and feel like handing over your soup power to Carmen, check out her website here.

I have learned...

I have learned so much with you all, I have learned that everybody wants
to live on top of the mountain, without knowing that true happiness is
obtained in the journey taken & the form used to reach the top of the hill.

I have learned that when a newborn baby holds, with its little hand, his
father's finger, it has trapped him for the rest of his life.

I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at
another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.

from Gabriel Garcia Marquez says goodbye*

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, famous writer from Colombia , and Nobel Peace
prize winner for literature, has retired from public life for reasons of
health. He has a form of cancer which is terminal. He has sent a
farewell letter to his friends.