I love fall! And I love fall colours and flavours and smells!

So I have been working extra hard to find good fall recipes with a vegan twist. I am also hosting a bunch of ladies for a Fall Festivus/Pride and Prejudice movie day (the six hour A&E version with Colin Firth) this Saturday and I am planning a whole vegan fall menu.

I am going to share some of my recipes for the weekend.

MAIN MEAL:

Garlicky mashed potatoes with chickpea cutlets and steamed veggies.

Mashed potatoes (just add garlic salt (or sautee garlic and then add the boiled potatoes) and butter and mash (I like thick taters personally))

Onion gravy: I found this recipe in my Moosewood Celebrates cookbook.
1 Tbsp of oil
1 onions sliced
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp thyme
1/4 rosemary
1/4 marjoram
1/8 nutmeg
1 1/2 tbsp soy sauce
You sautee onions in a saucepan with the oil until slightly browned. Then add all the rest of the ingredients until you get here:
Then you add 3/4 cup of veggie/chicken broth to the mix. In the last 1/4 cup of broth you mix in 1-2 tbsp of cornstarch and add in gradually. This will thicken it up for you.
1/8 tsp black pepper to season

The Chickpea cutlets are so good and easy to make. This recipe is adapted from Veganomicon.
You just add 1 can of chickpeas drained
3/4 cups of flour
3/4 cups bread crumbs
1 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves of garlic
1 tsp lemon zest (I use a squirt of “real lemon”) I imagine this is optional
3/4 tsp paprika
3/4 tsp thyme
2 tbsp soy sauce

Just process in a food processor until it’s a sticky dough. I like to roll small handfuls in flour to make them more manageable then I fry them in an skillet with oil until they start to brown. Yummy yummy!

BEVERAGES:

I am serving nutmeg coffee with soymilk and a whole variety of fall type teas as well as an apple cider made from mulling spices (from the health food store) and pure unfiltered apple juice (I use the recipe on the box). The masterpiece though is the Pumpkin Lattes. I found the recipe online. Here is my vegan version of it:

1 1/2 tbsp of pumpkin puree

1 ½ cups of soymilk

¼ tsp of cinnamon

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups of coffee

4 tsp of sugar

Use half of the milk mixture (everything but the sugar and coffee) and add to the coffee and sugar. Then whisk the rest to make a froth. You use it to top off the coffee and sprinkle with cinnamon or nutmeg as desired. 

DESSERTS:

Pumpkin pie

OK, this recipe is better than any non-vegan pumpkin pie I have ever had. You can’t even tell that there is tofu in it!

See: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=6174.0 for the filling recipe.

I used this recipe for the crust:

2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 3/4 tsp of salt, 1/2 cup of vegan shortening (made from vegetable oil not lard), 2 tbsp of butter or margarin and 5-6 tbsp of cold water.

Mix well and let chill in the fridge for 15 minutes. Then roll out and cook as described in the recipe above. Make two crusts.

Apple pie:

I used the same dough recipe (which is a little crusty for apple pie but prefect for the pumpkin.

I just chopped apples to fill to a large mound of the pie plate then added brown sugar, cinnamon to taste. Make sure you use a good pie apple. I used spartans and that was plenty juicy! Cook at 350* for one hour (until crust is golden) and then let cool before eating.

I also found this freakin’ awesome muffin recipe on the  Post Punk Kitchen website. See here: http://www.theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/index.php?RecipeID=72

I used apple sauce instead of soygurt and cut the sugar down by 1/2 cup and they turned out delicious!

This morning I was laying in bed unable to wipe the sleep from my eyes. I thought to myself that it is unnatural to expect someone to spring out of bed when the morning is still so dark and the morning so gloomy.

I have been reading about calendars and time today and there is a lot of interesting information about how they have changed over the years.

It seems that pretty much all civilizations have understood the importance of the planets and the sun in the telling of time. There have been many calendars over the history of humanity that have tried to capture the rhythm of the planets and the sun, and, in order to better match these cycles, they have had many revisions. This is because the rhythm of the calendar (for example eleven months of so many weeks of seven days) would result in problems over the centuries. Like in the sixteenth century the Julian (Julius Caesar) Calendar was celebrating their Vernal (spring) Equinox in what was considered by the people to be March 10. It is supposed to appear on March 20. They had lost ten whole days.

What does this mean? I am not sure. I think that the earth/universe (planets etc.) has a life of its own. Not that they are necessarily alive but that they have a rythm that is incredibly hard to capture with man-made methods.

How much healthier would we be if we used nature as our guide? What if we didn’t care what day it was or what time it was but rather took our bedtime cues from nature?

There are many ways that we harm our bodies by ignoring the cues from our environment. For example, the darkness is a cue for our body to release hormones that wind us down and prepare us for sleep. By keeping ourselves illuminated by indoor lights etc. in the evenings we delay our sleep cycles by hours. By drawing the shades in the morning we keep ourselves asleep beyond the hours that mother nature intended.

What if we followed the earth’s cues and prepared for bed when it grew dark and arose at dawn? I know that sounds crazy since we are all so used to a bed time somewhere between 10pm-12am and a wake-up time of somewhere between 8am-12pm.

But when someone suffers from insomnia or has poor quality sleep they are encouraged to create a bedtime routine such as keeping the lights dim, doing tasks that are relaxing and consuming foods that facilitate relaxation. If we took our cues from nature we would all be doing that instinctively.

Would our bodies benefit from a more natural cycle of sleep? I don’t know for sure but I tend to think so.

This is easier said than done for everyone. Getting into a rhythm of sleep, waking, work etc. by using the earth just won’t work in today’s society. Can you imagine telling your boss you’ll be in at ten o’clock from now on because it’s darker in the morning?

And I am sure that we would all be cranky when summer hit and we would have to be up at five or six in the morning.

But I think there is merit to using the earth and universe’s natural cycle of time to guide our lives. Granted we can’t live without clocks in this day and age but we can try to live a little less by the clock and a little more by nature and by the cues it gives our bodies.

There are many days that I could happily go to bed early but my hubby responds by saying, “But, it’s only nine o’clock.” Maybe that doesn’t need to be so important? Maybe we just need to crash when our bodies tell us to.

I am not fond of routines in any part of my life. I much prefer natural rhythms. I eat when I am hungry and I need to learn to sleep when I tired instead of when it’s “bedtime.”

How important is a healthy digestive system? VERY!

Digestion is more that just creating waste from the food we eat. It starts right in our mouths where saliva helps to break our food down. When I was in high school our teacher told us to put an unsalted soda cracker on our tongues. We were told to just let it sit there; not chew it. The saliva in your mouth will begin to soften it and break it down. It will actually make the cracker start to taste sweet as the breaking down process releases sugars from the cracker.

The food then travels down from the mouth to the stomach (I am going to skip some of the obvious details) and in the stomach is mashed by the textured lining of your stomach and further broken down by our stomach acid.

When the stomach is done its work the “food” will move down into the intestines where most of the absorption process takes place. The success of this phase is crucial because it is here that the nutrients and vitamins that your body needs are expelled from your food.

So, just as important as the foods you eat is your body’s ability to get what it needs from your food. You need to make sure that your intestines have ample time to absorb the nutrients from your waste before it is passed out. You also don’t want to the waste to pass through too slowly.

What can you do to help your body digest better?

Fiber! Fiber keeps everything moving at the right pace. When you have adequate fiber in your diet, the food, and its toxins (from processing, pesticides, whatever) are moved out of the body instead of remaining within. This means you aren’t going to have toxins building up in your colon or toxins being re-absorbed back into the body. And the type of fiber you consume makes a difference too.

Psyllium fiber is great at making you more regular but it has no nutritional merit. If overdone, it can move food along too quickly and result in your feeling full but being nutritionally deficient.

Dietary fiber from salad, veggies etc. is really your best bet. Eating a diet with plenty of vegetables will ensure that your digestion runs at peak efficiency.

Meat is bad for your colon, stomach and just about every part of the digestion process. Our stomach acid doesn’t appear to be designed to handle meat. The actual meat-eaters (wild cats etc.) have a very short intestine (because meat is rather toxic and prolonged time in the intestine is unhealthy) and very acidic stomach acid. So meat will slow up your digestion, allowing more time for your body to become acidic and for your intestine to reabsorb garbage.

Well, science is now realizing that cancer can’t grown in an alkaline environment. So eating alkalizing foods are a great way to fight disease. Alkaline foods are veggies! Foods that cause your body to become acidic are processed foods and meat.

The ability of your body to absorb nutrients and vitamins and minerals is why the kinds of vitamins you take is important. I don’t believe in the synthetic vitamins you buy at the grocery store. These unnatural chemicals are harder for the body to assimilate into your body and they are harder to break down because they are recognized as foreign, or non-food. This is why artificial sweeteners are calorie free. The body doesn’t recognize them as food, which they aren’t, and doesn’t absorb them. At least that is what is supposed to happen. There have been studies that show that we don’t flush all of these chemical substances out which means that some of these chemicals are still floating around in our bodies doing God knows what kind of damage.

You want to buy a natural vitamin that is sourced from natural products. These will be recognized by the body and more readily absorbed.

So take care of your digestive system and pretty much everything else will fall into place naturally. Being “irregular” means there is something operating under par. I don’t believe that band-aid solutions, like eating bran cereals, are the answers. When you have problems with regularity, or are having stools that are too hard or way too soft, you need to adjust your overall diet.

Having an unhealthy digestion process will affect you if more ways than just nutrition. Poor digestions has other symptoms like dull hair, fatigue, overall malaise, trouble concentrating, bloating, constipation etc.

It’s very important that we eat well to be well!

My oh my, where to start.

Yahoo News had an article today about the dangers of eating microwaved food. Well, to be specific the article was talking specifically about meat. The article states that microwaves do not heat/cook meat evenly and can therefore leave pockets of salmonella etc. growing in your food.

I don’t own a microwave. I gave it away about two years ago because I was worried about the health effects of eating microwaved food. I read a study that claimed that your food remains “charged” and that when you test the bodies of people eating microwaved food, their bodies retain radiation from the food for hours after consumption. This is likely to be detrimental to health. I have also read that microwaving your food can destroy the protein as well as vitamins and minerals contained therein.

Our food is already depleted in vitamins and minerals. Do we really need to further deprive our bodies of necessary nutrition by choosing the wrong methods of cooking our food?

To add to the point of salmonella etc. mentioned above I also wanted to talk about the listeria outbreak in Canada (which has as of yesterday claimed 20 lives). This outbreak is originating from a deli meat company in Quebec. This is noteworthy because the Conservative government has played a large role in the deregulation of safety testing in this field and the outcome has been less accountability on behalf of the company and a resulting contamination in meat.

Deregulation is a dangerous idea. You cannot expect that corporations will take the efforts necessary to ensure their products are safe. At the same time that Monsanto pushes the government to lessen regulations and accept pesticides, rBGH and GMO as safe, their CEO has been publicly quoted as saying that it’s not his job to prove his products are safe. A scary thought in a system that largely favours deregulation!

Pharmaceutical companies are another prime example of this. There are more people who die from properly administered drugs than from car accidents, gun violence, terrorism etc. combined. And yet, the FDA keeps allowing Big Pharma shorter and shorter approval times and hasn’t demanded third party analysis of data or anything else as part of the approval process! You can read my article on pharmaceutical integrity here: http://theworldismysoyster.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/the-conscious-consumer-and-the-doctor/ )

Time.com has an article about the flu vaccine (Does the Flu Vaccine Really Protect Kids? by Alice Park). Although this vaccine is touted as a crucial part of your health regime this article states that it isn’t reducing the number of children contracting the flu in the U.S.. The article clearly states that “the immunized youngsters were just as likely to be hospitalized or to visit the doctor  as kids who never received the vaccine.”

The creation of the influenza vaccine is mostly a guessing game. Scientists in a lab try to determine which three flu strains will be the biggest threat for that year and then create anti-bodies for those three strains. The truth is that there are hundreds of flu vaccine strains on the streets every year and the chance of the Flu vaccine actually preventing illness is quite low!

So, here is my advice: don’t contaminate your body and those of your family with the heavy metals contained in these flu vaccines for no reason. You are likely to contract the flu whether or not you vaccinate. So why bother?

Vaccines are difficult for our immune systems to handle (even more so for little ones). Instead of assaulting your immune system prior to the flu season just focus on boosting your immunity naturally (see my article on that here:  http://theworldismysoyster.wordpress.com/category/immunity/ ).

Another example of pharmaceutical integrity (rolls eyes) is an article from October 2008 issues of Pediatrics that states that one in 20 American CHILDREN received free drug samples from their pediatricians in 2004. That doesn’t like a lot but the article also goes on to state that the samples that the kids receive (as is true of ANY samples from your doctor) are samples of the newest, most expensive and least well understood (meaning unsafe) drugs available.

The article (quoted from Yahoo News) stated that “Four of the 15 most frequently distributed samples in 2004 were identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as having significant safety concerns, including new black box warnings or significant revisions to existing warnings.”

Remember that thousands of people die every year from using these drugs. Your family would benefit tremendously from becoming educated about the drugs you take, the reasons you take them and alternatives to them.

More news:

Now pharmaceutical companies are banding together and recommending that parents not give their children cough medicine if they are under the age of six! After spending years marketing to parents of toddlers they have finally caved into the bad publicity and decided to admit what many of us have known for years, that cough medicine is unsafe!

They also state that parents should not use antihistamines to make their kids sleepy (ie. before trips). I have had two parents recommend this to me and it’s all I can do not to yell at them. I severely judge any parent who thinks it’s acceptable to drug their children for unnecessary reasons. I think giving your child an antihistamine to calm them before a trip is equivalent to giving your kids a doobie to mellow them out! Actually, I bet marijuana is much safer!

Drugs are not candy people! Just because you can buy it over the counter, it doesn’t mean it’s safe. Becoming informed is the best thing you can do to protect your family from unnecessary harm.

I spend so much time trying to keep my kids and I in optimal health and lately I have been hearing a lot about the positive effects of DHA (an Omega 3 Fatty Acid) on the brains of children. It can help development and help reduce symptoms of ADD. It’s also good for adults on a whole plethora of problems like headaches and concentration problems (see my previous post on Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs) for more information). It’s also beneficial to the brain development of fetuses too.

But DHA is usually sourced from fish. Well, we don’t eat fish and aren’t keen on buying fish oils. So is DHA that only beneficial Omega 3 Fatty Acid for children?

The lady at my health food store thought that the idea of DHA being more beneficial than other forms of Omega 3 EFAs (ALA being the vegan one) was not true. I haven’t really read that that was the case but there has been so much emphasis on DHA that I was beginning to fear that I was wasting my money buying vegan EFAs.

Luckily for us, I found out that Udo’s Oil (my favorite brand) has recently come out with a DHA blend! His DHA is sourced from algea!

So even though I haven’t been able to quite sort out whether or not DHA is more beneficial than ALA I can now have the security of having DHA in a vegan formula. Not only that but his blend also includes a variety of other sources that provide you with Omega 6 and 9 as well. Let’s see fish oils do that!

I am very aware that if I do anything wrong with my kids those nearest me will use that as an excuse to discredit veganism. Not only that, but I appreciate a strong mind and spend time with my kids, even as young as they are, trying to expand their minds and help them develop their thought processes. I certainly want to them help them along in any way possible.

Studies done on vegetarian children show that they grow to be as tall and strong as their peers, do as well in school and measure up in every other way. If anyone needed independent confirmation, they should come and see my mutant boys. They are taller than and as athletic than their peers. Even on mostly vegan diets they have remained in the top 60-80 percentile for height and weight.

Like I keep saying, you don’t have to eat muscle to get muscle!

I have a little PETA gab today too.

I heard last week that PETA was asking Baskin’ n’ Robbins to make an ice cream with breast milk. My initial reaction was, “No, way!”

So I went on the website hoping to disprove my husband and nope, he was right. So I read into it a bit further.

I don’t know if they are actually serious about having a breast milk ice cream or not but their reasoning is actually pretty interesting.

People are immediately disgusted by the idea of making food with breast milk. Well, cow’s milk IS breast milk! Breast milk for baby calves.

I guess they are trying to show people how gross it is that humans drink breast milk into their adulthood and how gross it is that we drink the milk of another species. No other species in the world naturally does this. I have a whole post on Milk if you’d like to read what I have to say about the composition of milk and how it’s unsuitable as a food for humans anyways.

Again, I am not impressed with the presentation of PETA’s campaign but their message is quite, well, accurate.