SUGAR... da good, da bad and da very ugly

We had an interesting moment on Sunday.

Friends of ours were over for lunch, and since they are still transitioning into healthy eating, and also because they are both going through a lot right now I wanted to treat them. So I bought their favorite sweet, Lamingtons from Woolies as an after lunch treat. It was kind of weird buying dessert again, we just haven't bothered in so long, and whenever we need something sweet we make some Macadamia Carob Fudge (will post the recipe soon) or some other healthy alternative.

We made a conscious decision four years ago to not touch refined sugar again, and have pretty much stuck to it, besides the occasional biscuit at a social here and there, and a chocolate I ate from a box that was offered around once, with no real bad side effects. It’s also been interesting that we haven’t missed the sugar either, considering we used to be complete chocoholic freaks, spending insane amounts of money on chocolates each month. The only times I remember battling cravings would be during a fast where your cravings go from, weird, to down right wicked. I’ve also noticed that if I don't have my usual large fruit servings in the morning then keep me away from the chocolate aisles at the supermarket…

So, after lunch we passed the said Lamingtons around, I had a bite of one and found it way too sweet and quiet nauseating. Steve however, I later found out polished off 4. The interesting thing is we didn't have much fruit for breakfast. We normally have a large amount of fruit, but were running late and only managed a glass of orange juice with some nuts as we ran out the door. I was satisfied with this because I'm still dealing with all the over eating I did at the church camp I attended the last three days, but I think Steve needed his fruit intake.

Later that night, he began to shake like a leaf. His hands were trembling really badly and he said his body felt shaky and weird. He immediately cut up a mango, strawberries and kiwi with nuts and ate away. Before he finished the fruit salad the shaking had almost completely stopped.

Uh Huh! So let NO ONE ever say that the sugar in fruit is bad for you. Conclusive proof that refined sugar is bad for you and the natural sugar from fruit actually seemed to neutralize any of the bad side effects from the refined version.

Half an hour after eating the fruit he had completely recovered and slept really well. In the past this probably would have meant a disturbed nights sleep.

Interesting!

Mushroom Ricecakes

So where have we been? Our service provider was been hit with load shedding (Our country's idea to save and share electricity, due to lack of power stations) and is no longer functioning, causing us to be without internet for the last 4 months. Our ADSL line that we applied for all of 3 and a bit months ago has been installed... so watch this space.
In the mean time here’s an appetizer to keep you interested!! You all know how I've been raving about our avo and olive spread salsa biscuits or rice cakes.

So I upgraded it a bit and added some portabella mushrooms. I lightly dry stir fried them in a pan and added the secret ingredient, Mary-Ann's Seasoning salt. The secret to the secret ingredient is the nutmeg MA puts in her Seasoning salt, it does wonders for mushrooms and cauliflower. Anyway here is our own little pizza, salticrack, stack moment. Mixture of raw and cooked, but really yum. Enjoy!

All I can say is this was out of this world !!!!

We get by with a little (lot) help from our friends......

So after Steve suffered his major panic attack, causing the rest of us to almost suffer minor heart attack’s, it is safe to say life did NOT return to normal, but rather began a walk that has thrown the word “normal” out of our vocabulary altogether. Although at the time it sucked with caps, in hind sight it was the best thing that could ever have happened to either of us.

The advice he received from the emergency staff was to drink more fluids when exercising, they recommended a popular brand of sports drink, and maybe to see a heart specialist to have his heart checked out, and then.... well, to carry on carrying on I suppose.....

We were due to go on leave for a few days so we could spend some time with his brother who was visiting from the UK at the time. His visit brought a little false relief to us both. We threw ourselves into entertaining our house guest and possibly ignoring the horror of our recent "brick wall" experience. It's true that when you are heading in the wrong direction, God will throw you a pebble, then a rock, then a brick then eventually the whole brick wall, but His love is so fierce that He will do all He can, short of interfering in your free will, to firstly try to slow you down long enough to contemplate and hopefully recognize your wrong direction, but when that fails He will pull the brick wall maneuver to stop you in your tracks... more like a screaming halt in our case. However some days He is dealing with the ultra dense, after all that had taken place we still figured that we would carry on with life as usual. And so entertaining my brother-in-law for a few days helped to take our minds off of the reality that was lurking just beneath a very unstable tight rope that we don't remember mounting in the first place.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that we didn't question the advice we had received and rushed off to stock up on as much sports drink as we could carry, and we glugged it down naively believing in it’s magical healing powers with each sip.... sigh. No this is not a slate against any given product, or the emergency staff, if anything this is a slate against us for being so irresponsible with our health and continuing to leave our lives in the hands of marketing, advertising and our preconceived ideas of trained professionals. It's so much easier to leave it to the “experts” so to speak. It takes the pressure off of you actually having to seek for truth yourself. Not that this is what we thought we were doing, we truly believed at the time we were doing the responsible thing by listening to people we were raised to believe knew better than us in any given area. Secondly, we were overworked, over pressured, and would rather have sat back and placed our very lives in the hands of strangers that we believed knew better. The truth is, before the gigantic all knowing internet arrived with all it's many searchable accessories, people were taught to trust the experts of any particular field since we couldn't all know everything there is to know about everything, truth be told that wasn’t even wise.

However it's not like we have become any wiser through the internet either, just better informed, if that makes sense. You see we are all guilty of having retreated into our own cocooned, technologically generated and dominated worlds. Gone are the days of people helping people, the human touch of kindness and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These values were sadly replaced with an everyman for himself approach and if it means stepping on you to get ahead then so be it. As good as it is to be able to Google your way to answers to almost every conceivable question known to man, it has also stopped us relating with each other on a human level, and no technology can replace a human relationship or experience.

Right, now before you think I'm on a mission to slate all things technological.... (Last time I checked I was expressing myself on a blog) ....into our lives steps a lady named Mary-Ann Shearer.... and how pray tell did we find her?? Yep, you got it, we googled her :-). See it's not that I suffer technological phobia, once again, just like sports drinks are not the evil of all evils, neither is technology, and the same can be said of money, guns or anything else that has gained a bad reputation over time. It is rather man and his irresponsibility and mismanagement of all that has been entrusted to him. My point is that in spite of how screwed up the world may be due to man's inefficient management of this planet and all resources thereof, there are still glimmers of light in the shadows and the closer you get to them the brighter they shine until you realize they are not as scarce as you may have thought, nor dim as they seemed initially. Kinda the closer you get to God the more of Him you experience and the more you realize how much of Him there truly is.

Well MA is one of many bright lights we have discovered on our journey, and a journey this truly has become, but more on that later. After our houseguest left with meaningful hugs yet a scratch of the head and a shrug of the shoulders, (the first of many signs we would discover along our way as we tried to not only make sense of what had happened to us but also tried to explain it to others) we found ourselves tossed back into reality with a vengeance. To say we felt alone in the truest sense of the word would be an understatement. Perhaps it was the fact that we had been competing with the hamster on the wheel for so long that we hadn't stopped long enough to notice our cage had been moved, our water ran out and our new owner bred hamsters to feed to his pet snake... or maybe I’m being too dramatic. All I know is life had now become a very unfamiliar, scary place, with little or no road map out of the dark forest.

To be continued....

Our big discovery

So we really eat quite a lot of fruit and all our friends who come to visit often comment that the place looks like a fruit shop. We go to a few good fruit and veg shops in and around Joburg and always get great stuff, but lately we have been feeling a bit ripped off by certain shops. so Denise decided to look into the city deep fruit market where they all get their fruit from and what do you know. We can go buy directly from them !!

So we ventured off there last saturday morning and entered a whole new world. It is truly a huge market stocking all fruit and veg known to mankind - in season stuff of course. The best part of it was the prices, it's really much cheaper than going to a normal fruit and veg shop. Not that we will stop supporting our local shops, but for the bulk that we buy our fruit in it is far more cost effective. It's worth the trip once a week or every second week to go and buy like this.


As an indication, we paid R250 for this fruit below where we normally would have paid between R450 - 500. Not bad !!!



Then we wen't to another fruit shop our friend Brian told us about to go and check that out so we landed up buying some more there and then we went on to our usual places to get their big avo's so this is the whole lot that we bought that day. Thank God I won a second fridge a year ago, and now we're beginning to think we need a third....

Avo Crispbread

Well, Olive Pate is one thing, but you need something to spread it on. So here is one of my absolute favorite things to eat, mashed avo and crispbread.

Usually I just mash the avo in a dish with a fork, add enough lemon juice for tang and then add some of Mary-Ann's Garlic and Herb Salt to taste, love that stuff, makes everything taste great without that heavy garlic after affect.


This time we made a guacamole type deal with the avo by using the food processor to blend. We added juice of about half a lemon, some spring onions, a little finley chopped parsley and some of Mary-Ann's Garlic and Herb Salt.

I then got out the Salsa Corn Crispbread made by Orgran love this stuff too. I used to be a sucker for melba toasts or any kind of crunchy crisp breads, but then we cut out wheat/gluten from our diet, and I've since missed something crunchy like toast or the likes of. Really glad we found this stuff since it's gluten free and all, the Salsa flavour goes the best with Avo.

For the record I used to hate olives and Avo, amazing what you learn to love... Okay so I'm still working on the olive thing, but this pate is excellent. So did the olive pate first, then topped it with the Guac/avo then some sliced tomatoes and finished it off with da herb salt.


You can do whatever works for you, my wife turns hers into a salti crax delight, piling it high adding stuff like chopped red & yellow bell peppers and her chillie concoction....whatever, the point is to enjoy!

Olive Pâté

Been trying to do raw as much as possible lately, especially while it's summer, hot and easier to eat raw food, winter however is interesting without a dehydrator on hand. Yet even in the heat of the African sun where you almost crave raw foods, I find it's still difficult to keep things interesting. We've only started out researching the 100% raw way and find we run out of ideas for something quick, tasty, different and versatile. This is one of Mary-Ann's recipe's and I love that it takes minutes to make and I am yet to find someone that doesn't love it, even olive haters.

For the raw enthusiasts out there, yes, I know I'm using cashews, and that they're not classed as 100% raw but it's a good start and way healthier than anything found on grocery shop shelves, especially in South Africa.

A friend tried this at our place the other day and has been hounding me for the recipe, so B, this one's for you!

Olive Pate

Ingredients:

1 Cup Cashews

10-15 de-pitted olives (I mixed a few different types)

A little lemon juice & filtered water to help it blend (about a couple of tablespoons of each should do it, but just check the consistency)

Process the nuts in a food processor, I tried it in a blender and it worked just as well, but it seemed more liquid and lost the pate consistency, I also found I needed to add more liquid to get it to blend and needed to scrape the sides and under the blade a lot to get the nuts to blend, but it worked non the less and still tasted great.

Add olives lemon juice and water and blend further till it resembles pate, it actually looks like liver pate when done, but tastes way better.

Enjoy!

De-stone olives

Add olives to ground nuts

Voila!

Salad Platter

It's quite something to think that you can get excited about a simple salad, but this baby was delicious. Simply made up of sliced lettuce in the middle, grated carrots, cucumber, tomatoes, red pepper, onions, avo, olives and some sprouts, we added artichoke tops and a bit of chillie for a bite. You can also add grated beetroot but we found you need to grate it in the food processor it's one hecitclly tough vegetable.