My summer gardening project update

So a few weeks back, I was so excited about the prospect of having my own little oasis of herbs in my backyard this summer. A little update for you.

I've had mixed success. First I planted some cilantro and oregano in this massive pot. Each night after I planted the seeds, some little rascal outside dug them up. After 3-4 times, I was fairly convinced the seeds were gone. So I bought a cilantro starter plant while in the market one day. It is doing fabulously and is ready for harvesting. I have noticed that there are a few little sprouts coming up too around the cilantro. I'll have to wait to see if it turns out to be more cilantro or some oregano.

Next the mint. Never sprouted. So again I bought a starter plant in the market. It has grown a bunch as well. Can't wait to pick some of these beautifully delicious leaves!

Next is my parsley and summer savory. I should have likely started these seeds indoors a good month before I ended up planting them. But this was an experiment and I work by trial and error. Both are coming up slowly, hopefully I'll be able to pick some before the summer is over!

 

The basil, planted from seed is doing wonderfully. I'm going to transplant it into a bigger pot so it can spread out a bit more.

My two misses are my dill and my chives. I thought the chives would be easy, but I don't think the seeds germinated properly, same with the dill likely. Both had a couple little tiny sprouts at one point, but I think they died off, maybe due to either excessive rain or excessive heat we had in June here in Ottawa (you don't need a photo here, just picture a pot with nothing but soil in it).

So an OK effort. I'll have lots of "lessons learned" for next year!

On another gardening note, I came across this link recently. A city in Michigan is threatening jail time for a women who planted a garden in her front yard, with the hope that it would be a community project that neighbourhood kids could get involved in -- the city planning committee thinks differently. Utterly and completely ridiculous. Watch this video and see the utter and complete ridiculousness for yourself.

Amazing-town homemade blizzard

I came across this recipe a week or so ago. It's from Angela Liddon, who blogs at Oh She Glows about healthy living. She also creates tonnes of vegan recipes -- I've tried a few, not because I'm vegan, but because they are delicious, the no animal products is just a bonus in my opinion.

I recently made her Peanut Butter Chocolate Crunch "Blizzard" -- and well, here I am blogging about it because it was that good. I feel the need to spread the word further. Dairy Queen has nothing on this -- and it's also gluten-free, seriously it doesn't get better. Try it!

Source - Oh She Glows

Gluten-free: One month later

It was just about a month ago that I determined that I was what I'll call gluten-intolerant. So I've been living the gluten-free lifestyle for about four weeks or so now, more if you include the two- to three-week period that I was doing my elimination. So what have I learned?

1. Brown rice pasta and noodles are delicious. I can't get enough and could eat it everyday.
2. I miss toast with homemade jam on the weekends. Although I have a lead on a particular brand of gluten-free bread that might be good for toast.
3. Gluten-free baking is easy and fun and makes you feel very creative.
4. The internet is wonderful. While I do not have Celiac disease, it is more and more prevalent and there are so many lovely recipes and fantastic bloggers on the interwebs to keep me inspired.
5. I miss a good sandwich. I will work on ways to reincorporate – I need to investigate gluten-free wraps.
6. Best of all, I have learned that I feel fan-freakin-tastic! No more tummy pains, bloating, or gas for me!

Since January or so I have been eating real food, whole food, not packaged food, and along with some professional advice on adding some supplemental forms of vitamins and minerals I have never felt better. Pounds have literally melted off and my energy levels have soared. Eliminating gluten hasn't been a burden, but instead just one more small change that makes me feel fantastic.

And I for one will take feeling great over a slice of bread any day!

Organizing like my life depends on it

...because it does. Kinda. You see, my all-time best stress-reliever is tidying up and making sure everything has it's own place in my home, my office, my life! When I was a kid, I would clean and rearrange my bedroom every three months or so, so I could give new life to my belongings and re-organize everything.

Recently, I mentioned on my facebook feed that I was inspired to organize. You see, I found this little gem of a blog called IHeart Organizing and I just can't get enough. Such simple touches, to simple spaces to make them feel oh so much more pretty and organized. My dream... sigh...

Source

So I'm on a mission. My first space to tackle is my spare bedroom/office, for me and others I'm sure, this room is the room I spend the least amount of time in and so it becomes the room for everything that doesn't fit in the other main rooms of the house. I took on the bookcase earlier this week with vigour and managed to give the books some order. Hopefully in doing so I made some extra room for my ever-growing collection of nutrition books for school.

My goal is to make the room feel welcoming and inviting, not a catch-all room. I want guests to feel like it is a bedroom that will be restful and I want it to feel like a place I can go to get some work done without having to jump over three things to get in the door.

We'll see how it turns out. I'll try to remember to take some before and afters so we can see together if I've achieved my goal.

I'm so excited (and such a nerd!).

Summer!

Tomorrow is the first day of summer!

 My toes got a treat this weekend to celebrate.

Homemade gluten-free cupcakes, yum!

I finally made my cupcakes that I salivated about all week! YUM! The bf thought they weren't sweet enough; but to me, magnificent!

Visit Joy the Baker to find the recipe I followed (including the icing). 

Healthwashing - Have you heard of it?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of food labels. I've always been a food label reader, but I used to focus on the nutrition fact chart, you know this one, that's on everything. 

Source

But more and more at the grocery store, I've started looking at that ingredient list first, and the nutrition facts chart second, if at all. Marketing can be a mean game and more and more company's are trying to sell their products based on their "low-fat" or "low-calorie" or now more and more "gluten-free" or "organic" labels. These companies are trying to brainhealthwash you!

The very best example I have of this, comes from a fabulous nutrition blog I read daily, written by Meghan Telpner, a Toronto-area holistic nutritionist. In this post, she writes about guessing what the food is based on the ingredient list. You'll never guess. And furthermore, you'll never guess that this is being marketed to consumers as healthy! 

More and more we need to stop looking at the number of calories and pay a million times more time reading the ingredient list. If you find things on there that you don't know what they are, it's likely some sort of chemical that you really don't need in your body, let alone your child's. Just because something is "organic" or "gluten-free" doesn't equal healthy. Organic sugar is still sugar, for example, and hydrogenated oil of any kind is a trans-fat and should be avoided like the plague.

So all of this was brought on today, by a little visit into Shopper's Drug Mart. I was killing time out for a walk at lunch time and just popped in to see how much they charged for a particular item. While in the "Live well. Be well. Vitamins and Nutrition" section, I happened upon this:

 

 

What do you see? I see energy drinks and flavoured liquid marketed as water. Down in the corner just out of the frame are a few bottles of flax oil and 3 tubs of coconut oil – the only thing of value in the whole display.

Shameful... 

There are so many more examples of this everywhere. Got any good ones to share?