Outside

To know the paleness of the sky at dawn. To watch a storm build on the horizon and smell a rain before it hits your face. To be bug-bitten and scratched raw by scrub oak.

To stand in a grove of ancient trees and to feel profoundly that you are very small and very new on this earth. To feel a river wash over your feet. To ride the heaving arc of a wave.

To lie in a field or in your own backyard and watch the tiniest of creatures scale a blade of grass. To summit great columns of granite or walk a carpet of pine needles to the crest of a ridge.

To draw a breath of air that does not feel shared but feels new, pure, like the first breath you have taken in so long.

To stare at a night sky until perception of depth loosens, and it seems the black punctuates the light and not the other way around. To know the smell of a place, the light of it, the sounds that rise in the deepening dark.When you are anxious, when you are fearful, when you are lost, to move outdoors is the best medicine.

Potage Santé aka Green Soup

When you are used to cooking for two and are suddenly left to your own devices, funny things start to happen. Namely, your meals suffer. I inherited from my mother the proclivity to--when left to eat alone--combine leftovers of different and discordant flavors in the same bowl, at odd times of the day or night, and to eat them while doing a crossword puzzle. It's not a lack of interest in the preparation, or in the flavor of the food, but rather a tendency to fall into a time warp of concentration and work from which we suddenly awaken, and, ravenous, go for ease of access and the simple need to fuel. The crossword puzzle is a way to somewhat absentmindedly reboot the brain. It's that or solitaire. So while my sweetheart is scaling cliffs in Yosemite I have found myself, at 5pm or late at night, eating a "dinner" comprised of things in my fridge that can only be summed up by calling them "orts." Yup. It's been that good.

Yesterday we had the first rainy day in Sonoma in months. The sky was a smudge against the bleached hills, and while it never poured, a steady drizzle made it just cold enough to let it settle in the bones. In that damp afternoon, I went to the garden, picked a bunch of kale and uncovered startlingly red potatoes, gleaming like garnets in the black loam.

I was going to cook. I would not eat popcorn and pieces of turkey rolled around mustard and slices of avocado then dipped in hummus. I was going to prepare a delicious, nourishing meal and eat it at dinner time. I was going to make green soup.

Green soup is something my dad makes, and it is something his mother made. She called it Potage Santé, which means Health Soup. Hers always included sorrel, which is a delicious, lemony weed that grows wild and is a great detoxifier and general tonic. It's hard to find in groceries stores or markets so dad and I have both adapted the recipe, using whatever greens we can get. This is a soup for all seasons though I associate it with inclement weather: a rainy summer night, blizzards, sunless spring days and the first frosts of autumn. Each green soup is slightly different from the last--depending on the season, the mood, the vegetables at hand--but it is always green, always with the backbone of some kind of allium and a potato to thicken, and best accompanied by crusty bread warmed in the oven, and a couple of good cheeses.

Our sorrel hasn't emerged yet so I used kale from the garden, some cauliflower that needed a home, and, just to make it extra green, the last of a bag of frozen peas. I had no onion but young garlic worked just as well.

While this soup is a great home for the ends of vegetables it is also one which is vastly improved by the quality of the ingredients you put into it. It's a great neutral pallet for any array of herbs and spices but if your vegetables have come straight out of healthy ground or fresh from a farmer's market, you won't need more than salt and pepper.

The soup took me about an hour and a half to prep, cook, puree and reheat. At 7pm I closed my computer, poured a glass of wine, turned on some music, and sat down to a real meal by myself. It truly was health soup. Never underestimate the joy of cooking for one.

Green Soup

serves 4-6

4-5 cups chicken or vegetable stock or water

1 medium sized leek, sliced & washed

about 2 cups chopped celery and/or carrots

12-16 oz potatoes, peeled and cubed

4 cups dark leafy greens of choice, roughly chopped

2 T olive oil

1 T unsalted butter

salt and pepper to taste

optional add-ins
fresh or frozen peas
dandelion greens
spinach
collard greens or swiss chard
broccoli or cauliflower

sour cream, heavy cream or plain yogurt to top
chopped fresh herbs to top
red pepper flakes to top
edible flowers to top

In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, heat the olive oil and melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the leek and sauté, stirring, for about one minute. Reduce heat to medium and add the celery and carrots. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft and the leek is translucent. 

Add the potatoes (and broccoli if you are using it), stir, and then pour in the stock. The liquid should cover the vegetables. If it doesn't, add more stock or water to cover. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer, cooking until a fork goes easily through the potatoes. About 10-15 minutes. When the potatoes are cooked but not too soft, stir in the greens. You may need to add a bit more liquid at this point. Once the greens are wilted, remove the pot from heat and let cool about 10 minutes.

Working in batches, ladle the soup into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Pour the pureed soup into a bowl. If you are serving right away, pour the pureed soup back into the pot and heat at medium-low heat. Taste and adjust salt and pepper as needed. You may want to thin the soup with more stock or water at this point as well. If you plan to eat the soup later, let it cool after pureeing and then store in the refrigerator until ready to eat.

When the soup is hot, ladle into bowls and top however you choose. This time I used wild mustard flowers from the bed in front of our house. Crusty bread for dredging the empty bowl is highly recommended.

Yeasty-Beasties and a Note on Cleansing

I just spent 10 days being my own "client" to get over a case of the yeasty-beasties. Three steady weeks of visitors, celebration food, unsatisfactory amounts of sleep, more than satisfactory amounts of wine, lots of work, and a whole lot of stress about how to get "it" all done had tipped me into many of the habits I try to help other people break. I was sustaining my long days with sugar and coffee. I was skipping meals. I was saying "yes" to everything except to time for myself. I went days without vegetables and got in the very comforting but not particularly moderate habit of eating ice cream every day. Eventually, my body put the brakes on. *If you do not want to read about yeast overgrowths and cleansing, this would be a good place to stop reading. I looked and felt like I was carrying a partially inflated balloon in my pants, just under my belly button. I was foggy brained, groggy and irritable, and felt heavy and sore in my joints. Luckily, due to years of experience, I knew what was going on. I had the symptoms of a yeast overgrowth. I knew what I had to do. I put myself on an anti-candida, alkalinizing program that included a bunch of natural anti-fungals.

It was a mini-cleanse. No coffee but I didn't do away with caffeine. No sugar, so most fruit was out, but green apples added a little sweetness to my meals if I needed it. No vinegar except raw, unprocessed, apple cider vinegar but all the lemons and limes I wanted to add acidity. No alcohol. And sadly, no substitute for that. After 24 hours my beach ball belly had deflated some. After 48 hours, my joints stopped hurting. After a few days, my head was clear, my energy back up, and I was feeling much more like myself again. After 5 days I started experimenting with adding things back in--vinegar in a salad dressing, one cup of coffee, a couple bites of dessert. Now, about 10 days in, things are back to normal, though in my break from coffee I have realized that much as I love the taste of it, I don't really need it every day and that my energy feels much more consistent throughout the day without it. A bittersweet discovery.

I coach people through cleanses on a regular basis. Cleansing isn't necessary for everyone and the same cleanse may not be the best one for any two people. Cleansing has become very hip, which is not surprising given the stresses and excesses with which most of us live in today's western society. I don't recommend cleansing for fun. Or for fashion. And certainly not as a crash diet. So why do it at all? There are many reasons to cleanse, including but not limited to: identifying potential food sensitivities, helping with seasonal allergies, flushing parasites from the body, improving energy, or even just cultivating a deeper connection with the self when all your energy has felt scattered and eternalized. Cleansing can be an incredibly useful tool in healing the body. Having just gone through the process myself, here are a few things I re-learned.

1. Cleansing is not easy. It takes planning, dedication, and a willingness to be open to the experience. As our bodies detoxify we experience a range of physical and emotional highs and lows before finding an equilibrium. Cleansing can feel lonely without support but can also be made social with friends and family members who are willing to prepare and eat meals with you that are on your program.

2. Your body is your teacher. Our bodies tell us what they need. They give us signals all the time, throughout the day, and most of us can read the obvious ones. Hungry? Eat. Tired? Sleep. But our daily lives also force us to ignore even those obvious signals. Maybe we don't have time to eat so we chew some gum, go 7 hours without eating a meal and then, ravenous, gorge on whatever is readily available. Perhaps there isn't time for a good night's sleep so we respond to fatigue with caffeine and sugar, taxing the adrenals and eventually crashing hard. When you let your body cleanse and recover, you basically take out the background noise. You can hear what your body is asking for and perhaps you can make gentler choices about how to respond.

3. When you can't eat absolutely everything you take great care in preparing what you can eat. While a cleanse sounds boring and abstemious ahead of time, there is a beauty to the ritual of preparing your food when you are cleansing. You come to appreciate the healthy ways you can add flavor and color and texture and richness to a meal, using only foods that are cleanse-appropriate. And preparation of the meal itself feels like a gift because you aren't absent-mindedly eating throughout the day. On some cleanses there are more things you CAN eat than things you can't.

4. You have more time. In general, cleansing asks you to slow down. You are taking out the stimulants in your diet, and, ideally, some of the stimulants in your daily life, like computer and television, too. It's a time to unplug from external stimuli and plug in to yourself. You have more time, and more acute awareness of that time. And so an opportunity arises to be thoughtful about what you choose to do with that time and awareness. What can you do with that new awareness? What can you create?

5. There is great power in the ability to heal yourself. I find that one of the most unnerving things about feeling unwell is not knowing what the cause is, and thus, not knowing how to deal with it. Too often we take the little signals from our bodies and squelch the symptom without looking at the cause. If you have a headache, for example, you can take a pain killer, or you can think about what caused it before you react. Have you had enough water? When is the last time you ate? What was the meal comprised of? This is not to say that you should forgo professional medical diagnosis and treatment. Nor do I recommend self-diagnosing on the internet, because you will most likely convince yourself that you have symptoms of every medical condition known to man. But when done correctly, perhaps with the support of a professional or literature from a vetted source, cleansing can be part of healing system that puts the control and power into your hands. No one will ever know your body as well as you do. And it feels amazing to be able to respond when it calls on you for something.

This is a sprawling and, at times controversial topic that I have only touched on here.  I would love to hear input from you, readers. Have you cleansed? Do you have questions about cleansing? Experiences you would like to share? If you have any reaction at all to this post, I urge you to use the Comments section so we can get a conversation going.

Homemade Sugar Scrub

The other day I was listening to this, and dancing around the kitchen while making, for the thousandth time, a tried and true Dorie Greenspan recipe for rosemary-shortbread cookies. There is an instruction in the recipe to "rub the sugar with the rosemary until moist and aromatic." This is my favorite step because the sugar does become just that--moist and aromatic. I lift my hands out of the bowl and if I close my eyes I could just as easily be standing on a sunny hill in Tuscany surrounded by flowering rosemary bushes.  While dancing-myself-clean around the kitchen I realized that my hands were not only delicious smelling but silky smooth. I had just gotten a lovely little exfoliation for my kitchen-worn, climbing-worn hands. This is the (duh) light bulb moment. Why buy chemical filled body scrubs at the pharmacy when I could so easily make my own from my pantry staples? So that is what I did. If you don't have rosemary growing in your backyard or if you don't care for the smell or if you want body scrub that will last indefinitely, you can replace the fresh herb with a few drops of your favorite essential oil.

What does scrubbing your skin have to with wellness, you might ask? Skin is the body's largest organ. Through sweat the skin gets rid of excess water, minerals and salts, constantly helping the body detoxify. Skin cells form at the lowest level of the epidermis and gradually make their way to the top where they die and fall off. Exfoliating helps slough off the dead cells and keeps the pores clean and open so they can do their job. Exfoliation also helps improve circulation which helps stimulate cell renewal. And, of course, it makes your skin glow and makes it feel extra soft which is always nice.

This scrub is relatively abrasive so I wouldn't use it more than once a week. You could also opt to use it on just your knees and elbows which are often the roughest patches of skin on the body. Scrub away, and enjoy. Some other time I will get into the virtues of having solo dance parties in your kitchen.

Rosemary Sugar Scrub

1 cup sugar

1/8-1/4 cup fresh rosemary, finely chopped

1/4 cup olive oil (or coconut or other high quality oil)

Pour the sugar and chopped rosemary into a bowl and rub with your hands until the sugar is moist and aromatic. About 5 minutes (longer if the aroma is helping you fantasize about being somewhere other than your kitchen). Stir in the olive oil and mix until everything is well combined. Put in a jar or container with a tight fitting lid and store in your shower.

Maggie's Salad

Last weekend I had the privilege of being a bridesmaid in my friend Bree's wedding. Let me just say, in all my years of working closely with brides and more recently, seeing friends get married, I have never seen anyone so completely unruffled by stress on her wedding weekend. From the second I saw her Friday afternoon, through the hung over post-wedding brunch she was nothing but smiles, beautiful and beaming and clearly having the best weekend of her life. It was a joy to witness. An added bonus to the whole event was the reunion of some of my closest girl friends from high school. Cliche as it is, it is all too true that it does not matter how much time has passed, we drop right back in like we never skipped a beat. The only thing that has changed is each of them has become even more brilliant, more accomplished, wiser and stronger, sharper witted and bigger hearted.

The bittersweet side of the weekend was that I had to say goodbye to my man for a month. Pete's alpine climbing excursions have become common enough that you would think I would be used to saying goodbye. But while it gets easier, it is never easy and I was grateful that after saying goodbye to him in my dear friend Maggie's apartment I got to turn around and fall into a long, tight hug, and the same steady shoulder I have leaned upon, literally and figuratively, since I was 15 years old. After the bender of a weekend and my rattled nerves at sending my love into the icy mountains of Patagonia, I wanted something comforting and nourishing and simple. Salad. I know. It doesn't seem like comfort food but it was. It was as green as a salad can get, (as green as this one, also written about as a comfort food of sorts), and packed with all the things I had leeched out of my body with the weekend's festivities. The salad in and of itself is nourishing and nutritionally pious, no question about it. But the most restorative, nourishing part about it was making it and eating it with Maggie, weaving in and out of conversations covering every aspect of our lives, present, past and future.

There is a lot of emphasis these days on the food going in to our bodies, the value of each individual component, but half the time the way we eat a meal is just as important--if not more so--than the virtue of the meal itself. It doesn't have to be fancy or even particularly inventive. Just made with love, shared with love, and eaten with gusto (and probably a good glass of wine).

I used half of the ingredients we bought and left the other half in Maggie's fridge. When I came home to California, to my empty house, I recreated the dish. While I was throwing it together I got a text from Maggie, "How do I slice this fennel?"  I sent her the answer and sat down with my own green bowl, feeling suddenly a little less lonely, knowing that sturdy shoulder was only a text message away.

Slice the bulb in half...

...and then in half again.

This salad has endless variations. You can use your own favorite dressing, add different green things, more green things, other-colored things.... I added raw pumpkin seeds to mine one day and a poached egg the next. The key, no matter what, is to chop your ingredients to roughly the same size so you get all the flavors and textures in each bite.

Maggie's Salad (serves 2 for dinner)

Two big handfuls of spinach (about 2 cups)

1/2 a small bulb of fennel

One avocado 

2-3 stalks of celery

a handful of basil leaves

half a small head of broccoli

for the vinaigrette

1/2 t raw honey

1/2 t dijon mustard

juice of half a lemon

salt

1/4 cup good, green tasting extra virgin olive oil

Wash the spinach well by submerging it in a bowl of water and lifting the leaves out so the grit settles in the bottom of the bowl. Spin dry and chop roughly.

Trim the fronds from the fennel (you can add some into the salad if you like), and slice the bulb vertically in half, and then in half again. Slice thinly.

Slice the celery the same thinness as the fennel pieces. I cut mine on the diagonal.

Cut the avocado in half and remove the pit. Using a paring knife, slice the flesh three or four times, top to bottom, and then five or six times side to side, making a grid. Using a large spoon, scoop and scrape the avocado out of the skin. Repeat with the other half.

Slice the broccoli head in half, top to bottom and chop the half you are using, roughly, into pieces around the same size as the rest of the veggies.

Stack the basil leaves on top of one another and roll them up like a cigar. Using a good sharp knife (a dull one will bruise it) slice the cigar in thin strips.

Put all the salad ingredients in a large mixing bowl. In a small bowl whisk the honey, mustard, lemon juice and salt together until the ingredients are well integrated and there are no lumps of honey left. Slowly, in a stead stream, whisk the olive oil in. Taste and adjust the acid/salt/sweetness as needed.

Pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently until everything is nicely coated but not drenched. You may not need all the dressing in which case you can store the remainder in a jar at room temperature for a week.

Share with someone you love!

A New Year's Intention

 "I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false." Rainer Maria Rilke

There is great power in setting an intention, whether its written, spoken, or silently set in your own mind. 

What is your intention for 2013?

TIME OUT!

First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone for your comments and notes about my last post. It was my first really personal post and I was feeling a little shy about it. The immediate outpouring of positive responses was so encouraging and much appreciated. Please keep letting me know what you enjoy reading about!

So I had this long and nuanced post planned for this week about how stress correlates to illness and about how to seek balance in our lives and about seasonality and a few other things. Finally I realized I had written an overly verbose version of something quite simple that I want to say.

Here it is: I AM CALLING A TIME OUT.

I'm calling it for me and I'm calling it for you because chances are, you aren't calling it for yourself. It's a time out from To-Do Lists, from emails, from chores, and most importantly, from anything that involves the phrase "I should". We spend so much time running around trying to maximize our efficiency, and no matter how productive we are there is still this mounting pressure to do more, do better, and do it faster. Well not right now.

Right now it's tea time. 

Pull out your favorite mug, sit down and put your feet up. Maybe read a book, or better yet, do nothing more than admire your wool-clad toes and let the tea and the time do their work. You deserve it. I know you do.

Masala Chai

I won't bother to write a recipe here because I barely adapted it at all from one of my favorite blogs, Yummy Supper. I used almond milk, upped the amount of cardamom because I love it, and decided not to sweeten the tea but to add a little rose water which I find particularly calming when I am out of sorts.

I chose Masala Chai because when I traveled in India with my friend Rachel it was this sweet, milky, hot beverage that got us through each day. It revived us after 36 hour train rides, unnerving interactions on the street, the confusion of Indian bureaucracy and the general nerve-fraying experiences of traveling in a country that big, that crowded, and that stimulating (and thus draining).

Ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, pepper and star anise all have a mild stimulant effect which is at once comforting and rejuvenating. These spices warm the body, aid digestion, and help restore sharpness and focus to a fatigued mind.

Waking up from Routine

Photo by Ann Grinnell

I am a creature of habit. I love my routines. But lately I have been thinking about the dual nature of any practice that becomes rote. Routine is often positive --a weekly yoga class, a meatless Monday dinner, reading to a loved one before bed, a morning run. But even the best and healthiest of routines put us into a kind of autopilot. The repetition and the safety and the eventual thoughtlessness with which we ascribe to routine can prevent us at times from being in the world. I mean really being in the moment with all the senses engaged. Routine can make our worlds small, the focus narrow.

For the past few months I have been waking up early in the morning (against my instinct to hit snooze for the fourth time) to write for a while before my day of DOING THINGS begins. I sit in the same place, in the same way, with a cup of hot water and the shades pulled up and I watch the morning, the subtly shifting but mostly unchanged scene outside my window. After a few weeks I decided to sit outside instead of looking at the outside. It was a transformative experience. I felt--pardon the terrible cliche--alive. Instead of seeing the wind in the oak trees I felt the wind on my face. Instead of noticing a bird on a blooming sunflower I heard and watched two little finches flirt and fight over the leafy perch. Instead of noting the morning fog I smelled the Pacific, felt the salty damp on my skin. 

It's gotten me thinking--what do I miss each day by being a slave to even the healthiest of my routines? What passes me by? What and who do I take for granted? What do I miss by sticking to what I already know? 

I don't mean to say that we should forsake routine altogether in the name of potential experiential bliss.  But I would like to suggest that most of us could benefit from occasionally lifting our heads, and opening our senses to the unfamiliar. 

Erica greets the unknown

So often we think of health as something achieved by a careful calculation of nutrients taken in, calories expended, and vices moderated or avoided altogether. With all that calculating we forget sometimes to factor in pleasure, the wonder that can come from a spontaneous adventure, the unpredictable and hilarious turns that an unplanned night can take, the nourishment we receive from honestly connecting with another person. 

As always this is one woman’s opinion. But after a couple of months of deciding to say yes to just about everything and of relaxing my sometimes rigid rules and routines, I urge you to change it up. Don’t wait for the new year to try new things or to resolve. Start today. The changes can be small. Go for a walk alone without your headphones; sit in a different chair at your kitchen table; tell a loved one exactly why he or she is loved; eat your meal without reading or watching a screen or listening to music; get in the car, pick a direction, and explore like a tourist even in your own town; stay up to watch a meteor shower; get up to watch the sun rise; see and taste and smell and touch everything; become acutely aware of even the tiniest gifts--the sweetness of a breath taken in and let go.