Tea: Apple Cider Vinegar

Aynaria 8 Comments

Although I’ve used apple cider vinegar for numerous years, it wasn’t until about seven years ago until I decided to do more reasearch on it’s numerous benefits. I first learned about apple cider vinegar when I was a child. My grandmother that used it religiously, she told me some of its benefits and encouraged me to try it out too.

Apple Cider Vinegar contains Vitamins C, E, and A. It also contains the minerals calcium, magnesium, potassium, and many other trace elements and nutrients. There have been numerous claims made about apple cider vinegar. I’ve listed a few below.

Benefits of Apple Cider Vinegar

  • Improves skin tone
  • Improves circulation
  • Detoxifies and purifies the body
  • Fat burner
  • Natural household cleaner
  • Soothes mosquito bites

Sipping it straight from a cup is something most people won’t do, since it still has that strong vinegar tast. However you can mask the taste of Apple Cider Vinegar by including it in your teas and juices. I’ve included a simple recipe below for those who might be lookiing for natural ways to eliminate constipation.

Apple Cider Vinegar Tea

  • 1 cup of hot water
  • 1 tablespoon Apple cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon black strap molasses or honey

Sip and enjoy!

Technorati Tags:
Moondancer, Vegan, Vegetarian, Natural Remedies

Very Berry Smoothie; A sipping drink for summer

Aynaria 8 Comments

From salads, soups, jellies and jams. The main star of a dish, or served as side order. Whatever role it plays in my kitchen, I enjoy fruit. I cannot get enough of them. They come in a perfect package, that in most cases is ready to eat.

When it comes to desserts, fruits are my dessert of choice, I normally eat them plain. They are the perfect food to have on hand when you don’t feel like cooking.

Ever had one of those days when you really don’t feel like cooking, or you’re so busy you don’t have the time to cook? Yesterday was one of those days. Although I did have the time to prepare a meal, I simply didn’t feel like making anything. Thankfully we had plenty of leftovers available. Just in case, I had chopped up vegetables and fruits standby in case we had an attack of the munchies.

Now that I think about it, I did make something yesterday, the Very Berry Smoothie!

Very Berry Smoothie

    • 3 cups of unsweetened apple juice, water, or ice cubes
    • 1 cup strawberries
    • 1 cup blueberries
    • 1/2 cup blackberries
    • 2 plums
    • 1 peach
    • 3 cups of dark leafy greens (I used a mix of collards and kale)
    • 1 tablespoon of spirulina

drop Spirulina into the liquid without touching it, or the spirulina will gum up the spoon

Directions

Combine ingredients in blender, blend, serve and enjoy!

*I prefer my smoothies to be very thick, however it if it’s too thick for you, just add more liquid.

Experiment

Of course, you can select your own fruit too, say you want a sweeter smoothie you could add a few cups of pineapple or mango to the blend. Do you like a slight tart taste? Toss in some a few kiwis. The beauty of smoothies is that you can add or take away the fruits that you don’t like and make your own personalized smoothie. Have fun, and experiment with your foods.

spirulina_powder.07.19.10.jpg

Spirulina powder
A few facts about Spirulina…

I was introduced to spirulina in the early 90’s. I was living in downtown Baltimore at the time, to be more specific I lived in Mount Vernon. The place had a Bohemian type vibe to it that I really enjoyed. I was introduced to a lot of things while living there, became interested in Aromatherapy, got aromatherapy certifications and really started experimenting with my own skin care products. I met some fabulous crunchy folk during my time there, and some of them gave me gushing reviews about Spirulina.

Spirulina is a blue green algae that thrives in fresh bodies of water, like lakes and ponds. Numerous research has been done about spirulina; it’s purported to contain a numerous health benefits for the body. If you can, try adding spirulina to your cabinet. Include it in your smoothies or sprinkle it over your food. It’s a great way to enhance the nutritional benefits of the foods you consume.

It’s loaded with nutrients that are good for our body. Spirulina is 60% protein, which is higher than any other food. It’s also the highest source of B12. Did you know it contains ten times more beta carotene than carrots? It also contains iron, vitamin E and a whole host of nutrients that I won’t discuss here. You can learn more by reading up on the health benefits of spirulina. That’s pretty impressive right, I call Spirulina a super algae. Since its health benefits blow me away, I make sure I keep it in stock.

This very berry smoothie made a fair amount; we didn’t drink it all. About half of the smoothie was used to make fruit popsicles. It’s a healthier choice than the majority of the empty calorie popsicles you see at the store. The smoothie is an excellent sipping drink for the hot days of summer.

 

Technorati Tags:
Moondancer, Recipes, Smoothies, Vegan, Vegetarian, whole food

 

Weekend workout: Aqua jogging

Aynaria 2 Comments

Fitness-comic.07.17.10.jpgSitting in the sauna gives me a great view of those in pool. I see all ages, sizes, and colors congregate in and around the pool area. After a vigorous, or in some cases, relaxed workout, you’ll see a few move over to the whirlpool or migrate to my area (sauna) before heading for the showers.

Before today, you wouldn’t see me in the pool. I tend to avoid public pools, since I’m skeptical about whose doing what in them. Yeah, yeah, I know they add chemicals to the water to deal with the people who decide that the pool is a perfect place to use the bathroom, but it still grosses me out. Additionally, the chemicals tend to leave a burning sensation on my skin.

I’ve successfully avoided using Bally’s pool until today. The clamoring of my daughter with, Mommy, please take me to your gym, so I can go into the pool finally won. This morning I added her swimming gear to my workout bag and away we went.

My daughter was having a great time splashing about in the pool, getting comfortable with the water. I on the other hand, am showing my daughter where she can and cannot place her hands on Mommy in the water. Placing hands on the my waist, arms, or shoulders are good. Latching onto the boob area with a death grip, not so good. Although that part seemed to amuse another mommy there with her young daughter. It’s not as though I have an overabundance of boobage but whatever… We had a blast; to make things a little more entertaining for her I did some aqua jogging.

Aqua jogging isn’t just for elderly or overweight people. I’ve seen numerous fit folks engage in this activity at my gym. I just wasn’t one of them until today. Sure, it looks weird if you are on the outside looking in, but it’s a gentle way to workout too. This low impact exercise routine, is a nice change from my intense workouts, and the best part of it is I got to hang out with my daughter. I incorporate her into a lot of fun workouts I do around our house, so it’s nice to include her in some fun activities at the gym too. My daughter didn’t see it as exercise. She held on; squealing as I ran laps in the pool. She was having a great time! She shouted, mommy, do more! Do more!

My daughter is sold on pool-time. I knew she would be, so it looks as if she’ll be tagging along with me to my gym at least twice weekly. Here’s an informative article for those interested in learning more about aqua jogging and other pool exercises.

Cooking news…

Today, I didn’t make those grilled bean burgers with my soaked beans for lunch. I had every intention of making them. However, my daughter was hungry after our pooltime adventures, so I quickly made a dish with black beans & dark leafy greens. I’m not sure what I want to call it yet? It surely was colorful and flavorful. It’s loaded with veggies; collards, sweet bell pepper, swiss chard, fennel, garlic, and onion. Herbs and a few seasonings were tossed in the pot too. My daughter gobbled hers up, and is now sleeping. I did take pictures, so I’ll be sure to upload a photo soon.

Re: Bean burgers

The good news is I set aside plenty of cooked blacked beans. Remember I said I prepare a batch of ingredients when I know I’m going to be busy? Well, I did that with the beans. Now normally after preparing what I need for one dish, I’ll store the remaining cooked beans in the freezer. Today, I set aside more beans for our upcoming bean burgers. I’ve already whipped up the ingredients for bean burgers. They’re in patty form too, so the only thing left is to cook them. Perfect meal for the days when I’m too busy to actually cook, and since I pre-made them. I know what we’re eating is healthy. You can’t beat that, right?

What’s my daughter doing? She’s currently napping, it seems she’s had a busy day.

Question: How was your day? Was it busy or have you been taking it easy?

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Fitness, Moondancer

Overnight soaking; Black beans

Aynaria 2 Comments

black-beans.07.16.10.jpgIf someone were to ask me what my favorite bean was, I imagine I would say Black beans.

I love a variety of beans. I keep a large variety of dried black beans in our hosue. Some of which have been dried from our own garden. I’m very proud of that. Black beans are the ones I use most. I love the bold black color, and the way it contrasts with the colorful vegetables I add to my recipes.

Of course, it’s an added bonus that black beans are so good for you too. Why do you think I like them? 😉 Black beans are a great source of fiber, they are rich with antioxidants, and many other nutrients that I won’t mention here. But what about the gas? Depending on the dish I’ll add ginger, garlic, or fennel to combat this issue. They along with a few other whole foods are an effective way to prevent gassiness.

Earlier today, I mentioned I was craving lentils. I satisfied that craving by making a delightfully vegan savory lentil soup. Well, I’ve been craving black beans too. Earlier this evening, I set aside four cups of dried black beans to soak. Tomorrow I’ll cook them all in a large stock pot, set aside a cup, or two for some type of dish (I’m leaning towards grilled black bean burgers at the moment) and freeze the rest. I don’t use canned beans anymore, they simply don’t have the same flavor as dried beans. The frugal part of me, likes that they are cheaper to buy, and it’s fresher since the dried beans have recently been cooked.

The only drawback of cooking dried beans, is they take time to cook. That is, if you don’t have a pressure cooker. Crockpots come in handy in this instance since you can put your beans in the pot, leave the house to go about your day, and come back to cooked beans. I normally put prepare my dried beans in a stock pot. Eventually I’ll get around to purchasing one of those newfangled pressure cookers. I have an older pressure cooker. Updating to a smaller pressure cooker is ideal, since it will cut down on my dried bean cooking time.

When I know, I’m going to be busy; I prepare meals in advance. In doing so, I always have healthy options available so there’s really no reason for me to pick unhealthy foods. Since I’ve been following this type routine for years, unhealthy food really isn’t a temptation. However, in the early 90’s, I did have to force myself to get into this habit. If I didn’t, I would find myself reaching for the quick fix foods. You know what I’m talking about, processed foods that really aren’t that good for you.

Part of me, really doesn’t want to make grilled black bean burgers tomorrow. However, I told my seven-year old daughter that I was thinking of making them, and now she’s sold on the idea. Being the veggie burger lover that she is (especially the grilled variety) I won’t be surprised if I’m outside grilling, even if it is hot. Well, I’ll dress for the weather and wear a big hat.

Question: What’s your favorite bean? What’s one of your favorite ways to prepare it?

Technorati Tags:
Moondancer, Vegan, Vegetarian, black beans

Savory Lentil Soup; Soup that started out a salad

Aynaria 8 Comments

Lentil-soup.07.15.10.jpg


Savory Lentil Soup

Some say that lentils are to India as meatloaf is to America, it’s the ultimate comfort food. I’ve been Vegan since 1992, I haven’t eaten meatloaf since the late 80’s, however, I’ve made numerous dishes that included lentils.

For the past few days I’ve been craving lentils. I prepare Lentils in creamy Dhal. They make an appearance in sauces, and occasionally you’ll see them popping up in salads too. Regardless of how I prepare them, lentils usually have the starring role in dishes I prepare, and for good reason.

Despite their small size, lentils are a nutritional powerhouse. Serving up a variety of healthy and tasty, nutritional options that will keep you (and your loved ones) clamoring for more. Over 80 nutrients can be found in this tiny bean. Important minerals like iron, manganese, copper, phosphorus, folate, and molybdenum. It also boasts two types of B vitamins. Let’s not forget about fiber, just like most legumes you’ll find lentils far ahead of the pack serving up a healthy dose of soluble and insoluble fiber.

Yesterday, after my daughter’s piano practice was over, we stopped by the store and I purchased some dry lentils. I prefer purchasing my beans dry, unlike other dried beans it lentils don’t take as long to cook. So if you don’t have a pressure cooker, your beans won’t take hours to prepare.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon Pig in the Kitchen’s truly delightful virtual community. Although many posts caught my eye, I couldn’t help but to chuckle at her latest post. In that post, she wrote about her competitive nature (I can completely relate) and at the end of her post she shared a recipe for a truly delightful lentil salad. Although I had every intention of making some type of salad, my lentils had a mind of their own and I found myself making a savory lentil soup. Ahh, no worries, I haven’t made lentil soup in a long time.

Savory Lentil Soup

  • 2 cups of dried lentils
  • 8 cups of water
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 2 medium tomatoes
  • 1.5 cups of corn
  • 3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
  • 2 tbsp of lemon juice (I used freshly squeezed lemon juice)
  • 1 tbsp curry
  • 1 bay leaf
  • organic sea salt
  • freshly ground black pepper

Directions

  1. In a large stock pot, add lentils, water, garlic, onions, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for about an hour.
  2. Add the corn, tomatoes, lemon juice, and curry.
  3. let simmer for two – three minutes
  4. Add salt and pepper, season to taste
  5. Serve and enjoy

I tend to add my vegetables towards the end of the cooking time because I like the fresh taste of vegetables. They’re so flavorful. The good news is, there are so many different vegetables you can add to this dish. I had every intention of adding carrots, but checking my vegetable crisper I realized I didn’t have any. Although I love my dark leafy greens, I chose not to add them to this soup. It didn’t stop me from munching on them throughout the day.

Oh, I did add about six leaves of fresh lemon balm to this dish. We have it growing in our yard; it’s right next to the bee balm. I wanted to see how it turned out. I liked it, but think I should have added more leaves. There’s always next time, right? Cumin was purposely left out of the dish, simply because I wanted to see how I liked the soup with curry, it still tasted great and my daughter wanted more.

I had no intentions of making soup on an extremely hot day, but I really enjoyed the results, and we have leftovers!

By the way with the exception of the seasonings, lemon and garlic, everything else came from our garden. Now how’s that for fresh?

Technorati Tags:
Moondancer, Recipes, Vegan, Vegetarian, whole food

Feedburner: RSS Woes…

Aynaria 2 Comments

feedburner.07.25.10.pngIf you check out Celebrate Life via an RSS application, you might have noticed a change in the way you view my website.

Instead of getting the full post, you were only able to get the first few lines. In order to see the entire post you had to click on the more feature. The reason for going to summary was simple, for some reason Feedburner was returning an error message for my full posts.

I know quite a few bloggers that only post the summary. They do it for a variety of reasons. In fact, with a few of my websites, I opted for summaries too. However, I didn’t like it and after a few weeks, I went back to showing my full posts via RSS feed.

Showing just a summary of your post won’t automatically deter those who want to steal your content. Some of my original articles were stolen when I only had summaries enabled. With NetNewsWire for Mac, I can still view your entire post within my RSS feed. Yes, even if you choose summary. I can even comment from NetNewsWire too. I simply click on the more button, one extra annoying step but if I enjoy your website, I’ll do it.

Ok back to my RSS woes…
Just showing the summary wasn’t something I wanted to do, however, I noticed when I published my Bye bye Drought post this morning, my new post wasn’t showing up in NetNewsWire, My RSS feed reader. Now see, that is why it’s a great idea to subscribe to your own feed. In doing so you’ll most likely be able to see whether there are potential errors for those who view your blog via RSS.

Feedburner-Troubleshootize.2010-07-15 at 9.54.41 PM.png

Logging onto Feedburner, I clicked on the Troublehshootize Tab. The Troubleshootize Tab, opened up the above page. It was straightforward and walked me through a list of things I could do to get my service up and running again, unfortunately none of those worked. The last resort was clicking on the Resync Now button located towards the bottom of the screen, I held my breath hoping it would work, but unfortunately it didn’t. However, I did receive reasons why it wasn’t working.

WordPress There is an issue that must be addressed with your source feed

and…

Your feed filesize is larger than 512K. You need to reduce its size
in order for FeedBurner to process it. Tips for controlling feed file
size with Blogger can be found in Tech Tips on FeedBurner Forums, our
support site.

Uhm, yippee? The thing is, my file size for ten posts wasn’t that large. I know I export my WordPress files a few times weekly. Speaking of backups… How often do you back up your websites? All right back to the file size. Since I knew that wasn’t the issue, I couldn’t help wonder what on earth could be the problem? Checking the World Wide Web, I found a lot of people had experienced similar issues with new posts not being picked up by Feedburner.

WordPress-Admin-Panel-Reader-Settings.2010-07-15 at 10.12.31 PM.png

How did I get the error message to disappear?

  1. Log into WordPress admin panel
  2. Click on Settings
  3. Click on Reading
  4. In Reader Settings, select a lower amount of posts to be shown in your RSS feed

    5. By default, my RSS post view was set to 10. Initially I tried changing that to five posts to be shown in my RSS feed, since that didn’t work I chose a summary of my posts, saved my Reader settings, and my new post was viewable in my RSS feed.

Oh by the way, if you’re not following me via RSS feed, and would like to do you can susbscribe to the Celebrate Life! RSS feed. Not a fan of RSS feed readers, that’s cool you can subscribe to Celebrate Life! by Email, or virtually visit my website. Another thing, you can visit me on your mobile phone too. Now I’m not one to search the internet on my mobile phone. I use it to take/receive calls and occasinally text people. Sometimes I might take photos but that’s it! Oh, I do check out my websites just to make sure they are mobile compatible. Anyway, I recently installed WordPress Mobile Pack, a Word Press Plugin, to make my website mobile friendly.

My apologies for the short summary posts via RSS feed, I’m still playing around with various options so here’s hoping full feeds will be back soon.

Update: Good news, it looks like Feedburner is behaving itself, so full posts are enabled via your RSS feed reader.

Bye bye drought; the rain dancing worked

Aynaria 6 Comments

Say goodbye to a garden full of half wilted plants and say hello to the a garden coming back to life. The past few days, we’ve received a buttload of rain here in Maryland, and I along with many other gardeners/farmers are doing a happy dance. The past several weeks, rain has been scarce in our neck of the woods.

Last week we reached 100F a few days in a row. I can deal with the heat; I sit in a dry sauna several days weekly. The temperature gets up to about 180F. However toss in the humidity, and the biting flies and it’s not exactly fun being outside tending to the garden. Regarding the lack of rain, watering parts of the garden with our garden hose helped with some of our produce, but others (even some that hadn’t been watered) couldn’t handle the drought and intense heat and they withered up and died.

So yes, we’re excited about the rain. It’s great to see brown grass turn green again. Also, nice to see the scarlet red peppers, and the dark purple eggplants flourishing. Thanks to the downpour of rain over the past few days. Checking out the grapes, it looks as though we’ll be seeing them within a few weeks. Hot pink blossoms are all over our fig tree, and it’s one of the favorite spots of the butterflies and bees.

I’m still eliminating items I’ve had for years in the house. We don’t use them, so why in the world am I keeping them? At times, it’s hard for me to get rid of things and I need to realize that I simply need to let go! Over the past month, the Purple Heart has been called at least twice and we’ll be following up with them again soon. The recent cleaning frenzy I’m on reminds me of the nesting bug that hit when I was pregnant with my daughter. Thankfully people stayed out of my way.

I’m hoping I get a chance to take some pictures today, upload them onto my MacBook Pro, and perhaps share a few photos here at I’m Celebrating Life. My daughter has piano lessons today, and I really need to stop into the Apple store. I have a few projects that I need to finish for clients before my daughter and me head out to the swimming pool later today.

My workouts are still going well; I listen to my body, and know when to take it easy. If you don’t you can damage your body. I have slightly sore hamstrings today. I worked them out in a different way. I’ve found that sauna rounds is helpful, along with massages where I add a homemade sport rub to the affected spot can be extremely helpful.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I would be starting a raw juice cleanse. I most likely will be starting that at the beginning of August. Perhaps I should write down what I consume during the week, and list the benefits of the various juices I use.

Question: What are your plans for today?

Technorati Tags:
Gardening, Moondancer