Making Love in the Kitchen

It was a 5 Star event in the mud, a gathering of Ontario’s best chefs, food and volunteers in the name of saving 2300 acres of prime farmland. It is estimated that over 20,000 people gathered in Melancthon Township at the aptly named Foodstock event to protest the proposed limestone mega quarry.

In a nutshell, an American-financed company, Highland Companies, has big plans for our prime potato farmland 85 km north of Toronto. Below the beautiful soil there is approximately 1 billion tonnes of limestone and Highland wants it all.

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We work our patooties off around here- as you may have noticed, but we also cook a little here and there, and do our best to laugh until we cry once in a while. It’s part of our creed really. Up there I am rocking the awesome onion goggles Alexa introduced to our kitchen. Speaking of Alexa, I am pretty sure she never wants to look at cauliflower again.

And Jill, she is so over squash.

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Perhaps we’re too extreme? This article was rejected from The Huffington Post.

Is There Something Wrong With Government Regulated Food Guides?

Do you look down at your dinner and see 680 calories? Perhaps a healthy ratio of carbs to proteins to fats? Maybe you see some fibre, vitamin C, beta carotene and just the right amount of Omega 3’s.

This is weird right? Looking at a plate of food without actually seeing the food.

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Magic seems to happen around here quite often. It’s a sweet thing. I truly believe, perhaps more than ever, that you if you give, give, give without expectation, you will get, get, get in more abundance than you can believe.

As the creed says, we must “Offer the planet what you want the planet to offer you in return”. The creed I developed for my life and my work is how I strive everyday to live. In the coming weeks, we will be breaking down that creed step-by-step, almost as a guide, so I might explain what it means to me and you might decide what the words mean to and for you.

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October is breast cancer awareness month. Slightly redundant really, as I am pretty sure we are all aware it is out there, our options if we are diagnosed with it and so we can wear pink ribbons, use special pink lipstick, eat pink M&Ms, host pink themed bake sales and even drink a little pink Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

I think we’ve been aware for some time now, and it doesn’t seem to be doing all that much. Between being aware, donating money to who knows where, and stressing our poor nervous systems with all these crazy marathons for the “cure”, maybe we should take a different look at things. We’re all aware, now let’s work on prevention.

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It’s approaching that dreadful time of year again- saying goodbye to Summer and hello to Fall. Shifting from season to season is a lot like shedding a layer of your earth’s suit. Its time to let go of the past (Summer) and look forward to the future (Fall), but ALWAYS remember to stay focused in the present. One way you can honour your self during this time of transition is to practice yoga.

Read below to learn the top 10 reasons why you should continue to and/or begin practicing yoga!

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We all get them from time to time. They creep up on us and it’s all we can think about for the rest of the day. We get a bit cranky and feel like taking a snooze. We may even resort to digging deep in our pantries to see what we can come up with. I’m talking sugar cravings. We all know that when we get them they’re super beastly and relentless. We often find ourselves giving in just to stop that “need” we feel.

It’s okay to admit you give in. It’s not the end of the world, it just means we need to take a look at why they’re happening and what emotions we’re experiencing and nutrients we’re missing out on that are the driving factors. When we get down to it, stress is often the real culprit here. As Meghan has outlined this week, stress is a huge problem we face in our day-to-day lives. It seems to be especially prominent this time of year when our routines are changing, kids are off to school, and we have a million things on our to-do lists.

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What a week it has been. I have been doing my very, very best to abide the rules I wrote myself with my 21 Days To Health, program. My most favourite challenge of course is on day 3 when we must get ourselves to bed early. There are three things I love to bits that help me sleep like a baby.

Sleep mask to block out the light.
Lavender essential oil sprinkled on my pillow
3 capsules of Peaceful Spirit- my most fave bed time supplement in the whole wide world (more on that next week)
I have been loving these things even more as I spent just three nights last weekend on the other side of the country, 3 time zones away in Vancouver and then came back right in the swing of things. And you know what? No jet lag! Not even for one night. It was amazing.
I digress, as today I sit in the audience at TedX Toronto, invited to participate as a delegate, I wanted my brain powered up and ready to rock. And you know what does it? A green juice breakfast and a smoothie brunch.

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As childbirth becomes more and more medicalized, savvy women are contracting the services of women in a rather traditional line of work. They’re hiring a doula.

A doula is a trained and experienced professional who provides informational, physical and emotional support to expectant families throughout pregnancy, labour and the first few weeks of their baby’s life. She can be a vital part of your birthing team.

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My name is Jen and I do not condone the use or consumption of packaged foods.

This is not because I have the “nutritionist” moniker associated with my name. It is just my food philosophy. I believe in eating whole unprocessed foods because I really want to be healthy and quite honestly, packaged foods are gross. The were made in some far off factory from strange ingredients and taste more like the cardboard box they come in than real food (I know this because I was once a university student and managed to somehow get by on lean cuisines and frozen burritos for dinner. I’ve since moved on).

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Well didn’t we have just the most fun ever at last weekend’s Vegetarian Food Festival? Didn’t we? How can you not have fun when there are grown men running around dressed as giant peas?

I was busy sharing my wares at my booth.

I was most excited about how excited everyone was over our brand new creed, irish moss, tote bags, and sleeping masks (with fabric I designed myself, I might add!)

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Creative projects have an endless amount of therapeutic benefits. Creating something with our own two hands leads us to sentiments of accomplishment and pride, these feelings are present in us even from the age of two when we draw our first circle or when we colour in our first picture. As we grow, our projects may increase in complexity but the feeling of achievement remains. Taking nothing and molding it into something allows us to gain confidence. We begin to value our self-worth and individuality the more we create, the more we put our ideas out there, the more we grow creatively.

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It all started with my friend, Ashley. You could, in fact, call her my gluten-free muse! You see, Ashley follows a gluten-free and vegan lifestyle (which, as Meghan Telpner is fond of saying, has cured an incurable disease – Crohn’s). And when you are vegan and gluten-free, you can have some challenges around finding versions of your former favourite foods. One of these for Ashley, was bread. She could find breads she could eat at our amazing local health food stores, but they were often expensive. Or full of things like ‘potato starch’. And when you started out eating lovely unrefined whole grains, why would you want to switch over to white bread substitutes?

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We all have those veggies we don’t really like. The ones we know are great for us, but for whatever reason, they just aren’t the ones we would ever reach for when we are staying on our game and desiring a healthy snack.

For me, it’s carrots and celery. I wish to bits that a handful of carrots were a desirable snack for me but they just aren’t. Maybe it’s because they’re so freaking hard and I have wires cemented to the back side of my front and bottom teeth, a souvenir of the years of braces. Every time I bite into one of these shard-of-glass like veggies I am fairly sure they are going to crack off that cemented wire and I will find myself back in the orthodentist’s chair with one of those big plastic speculum type deals stretching my mouth unnaturally far from my face, all while surrounded by twelve year olds.

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This is the part of my demo at the Hot and Spicy Food Festival last week where I held a jar of fresh sesame milk and sang love songs to My Nut Sack after mixing up the most amazing Hot and Spicy Brownies you’ve ever tasted.

Don’t believe that I was singing? Really? Well, then you should have been there because then you would know for sure. Or, you can come by The Toronto Vegetarian Food Festival this weekend and see me live and singing at my cooking demo on Saturday at 4:00pm.

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