Prenatal Yoga For Back Relief

Doing a lazy post today and simply sharing my guest post over at Code Name: Mama.  I wrote about some of the most important yoga poses to do to relieve back pain during pregnancy.

What pose helps you the most when you have an achy back?  If you don't practice yoga (if you don't you should!!) what tips do you have to relieve back pain naturally?

Supplements I Give My Toddler

Some health experts will tell you that if you eat perfectly then you don't need any supplements. Other experts say, even if you eat perfectly, you still can't meet all your nutritional needs without supplements.

Although I am certainly not an expert, I am in the other camp, and I am a big fan of supplements. I don't even eat perfectly yet, but I also agree that it is really hard to get everything you need from food consistently even if you do eat absolutely perfect.

I took my dear friend Lindsey, to New Leaf Market the other day. New Leaf Market is a great little co-op natural food store in my hometown. They can be a wee bit snotty, but overall it is amazing resource. I can even buy raw milk in the store!

Anyway, we went shopping together, because she was a little overwhelmed with the supplement choices and she wasn't sure what her 2 year old son needed, but she new he was lacking in some nutrients and wanted help.

So we went up and down the isles together and I showed her the brands I like and use for Penelope.

Here is what we got:

• Cod Liver Oil
• Vitamin D
• Vitamin C
• Multivitamin
• Probiotics

If your child has some serious issues like eczema, epilepsy or even cancer I highly suggest taking an herbal supplement called Protandim.   Please email me if you want more information.

Here are the brands I like best for each supplement:

• Cod Live Oil: Green Pastures.  They do not make chewables anymore, so I get the liquid and put it into Penelope's smoothies.  If she doesn't have any smoothie on a given day, I give her a chewable version I get from Earth Fare.  Nothing compares to Green Pastures, but if you can't afford it or can't get your child to take it in liquid form, a chewable version is fine. Or even better, slather it on their butt during one diaper change a day.  The oil and nutrients get absorbed right through the skin!
• Vitamin D: Solaray makes a sugar free, flavored chewable tablet.
• Vitamin C: I like Hyland's best
• Multivitamin: I use Shaklee's Kids.   Penelope loves them and they have no sugar or food coloring or yucky fillers.  And I like supporting a mom who is running a network marketing business.
• Probiotics: Nature's Way makes a loose powder form which is great for slipping into smoothies or bottles of milk.  Even a newborn should get probiotics.  You can sprinkle some on your nipple before the baby latches on, or sprinkle some on their tongue.

Please be clear, I am not an certifiable expert in supplements, this is just what I do for Penelope, based on lots of research, but still I am not an MD, nor am I doling out medical advice.

I also use my intuition as a guide once I do my research.  If I feel in my gut that she needs two things of vitamin C one day if a cold is coming on, or two things of Vitamin D if she is teething. I go with my gut. If I forget to give her everything one day, I take it as a sign from my higher self that she didn't need it.

What supplements do you give your child? 

This Moment: Happy Family!

My family and I just got back from an amazing trip to California.  My husband drove out by him self and stayed with friends and went to several national parks.  Penelope and I flew out to meet him and we all stayed with friends in Ventura, California.  We planned on just going to the beach and camping while we were there, but a last minute decision to go to Mammoth Mountain to snowboard, also landed us in Yosemite National Park.  I have a buddy from high school that works there and the stars aligned perfectly for us to get a campsite.

Most of these pictures are from Yosemite and the last one is while camping in Leo Carrillo.  But they all have a theme.  Can you see it?  Relaxation and Happiness!

These picture clearly depict why I was so adamant about getting on that damn plane.  This family needs to travel.  We are happiest while on an adventure, exploring new things, and not having a detailed plan.  This was our first real trip since Penelope was born.  I am so glad we went!  Peter needed it so bad.  He is like a new person.  The person I fell in love with almost 8 years ago.  Thank God!  So this trip really made it clear to us, how we need to reprioritize our life and make sure that traveling is at the very top of the list.

I will do a  more detailed post next week and share some tips about traveling with toddlers, but moral of the story, we are one happy family!

How I Quit Sugar

For five days anyway.

Well, five days may not seem like a lot, but to me it was.  I have never gone more than a few hours without sugar (in any form) since I was 12 months old.  Maybe sooner, who knows when my parents starting giving me processed apple juice (aka SUGAR.)

Let me just start by saying, that sugar is bad.  Really bad.  I could write a whole book on the topic, in fact, many people already have.  Suffice it to say, sugar is at the root of all sorts of issues from high blood pressure, diabetes and even cancer (cancer tumors feed off sugar).

It messes with your digestion system, and if your digestion is bad, your health is bad. Period.

Seriously, I can't even begin to go into how horrible sugar is for you.  So just do me a favor and go read these books:  Nourishing Traditions and The Diet Cure.

The Diet Cure is an amazing book.  It's wonderfully written and makes it easy to comprehend the complexities of the human body, how it works and how what you eat (nutrition) affects every thing in your body.

I first read the book when I was focusing on quitting my caffeine addiction.  With the help of some amino acids, as recommended in the book, I have been caffeine free for almost 6 months.

Sugar was next on my list!

I knew I may have had a slight yeast overgrowth in my body, and that part of my powerful addiction to sugar, was from the yeast yelling at me to feed it more sugar, but what I didn't realize, until after reading The Diet Cure, is that I very may well be ALLERGIC to sugar as well!!

By end of day 2, I felt like I was going to die.  Like I had the worst kind of flu.  I am not sure if was drug (sugar is a legal drug people) withdrawal effects or if I was feeling the yeast die-off effects.  I was feeling much better by day 3.  By day 4 I felt great!

Typically, they say that you shouldn't do a detox while you are breastfeeding.  But from what research I did, I felt like a yeast detox is not the same as a heavy metal detox and would be ok.  And plus, I figured if I have yeast overgrowth, she does too from drinking my sugary, yeasty milk (sigh).

Here are the supplements I took to help fight off the yeast in my body:

• garlic
• oregano oil
• grapeseed extract
• licorice root (there is some controversy about this herb and whether or not it is ok to take while breastfeeding.  I went ahead with it and listened to my gut, because I felt my body could handle the hormonal fluctuations and I felt like it was really important to kill the yeast in my body now, before I get pregnant again and I can't take this herb then.) 
• Solarary (my preferred brand for all supplements and vitamins) actual makes a pill that combines all of the above, so I just took one pill three times a day to get all those herbs in me.
• additional doses of reuteri probiotics (normally I just take one a day, but I upped it to two a day for the two weeks I was abstaining from all carbs to kill off the yeast).

These are the supplements I took to reduce my sugar cravings and normalize my blood sugar:

• L-Gluatmine ( I took this 4 times a day, one with each meal and one before bed time)
• Chromium 3 times a day with meals
• Biotin, 3 times a day with meals
• Vitamin B1, 2 times a day with meals
• I also upped my prenatal vitamin to three times a day, previously I had only taken one a day.  But after reading The Diet Cure, I realized that you are supposed to take 3 to 6 pills in one day to get the full amount!  Check your bottle at home, it will probably say one serving is 4 pills!
• I also upped my calcium and magnesium.  This is not directly related to sugar cravings, but something I realized I was a little deficient in after reading about the amounts I should be getting per day in a supplement.

I continued to take my protandim, cod liver oil and extra vitamin D like normal.  I also still take GABA and Tryptophan to help restore my adrenals from a lifetime of sugar and caffeine addiction.  I will probably stop taking them in another month.

It's a lot of pills. I know.

And its expensive, I get it.

But once you have killed the yeast and freed yourself from your addiction to sugar you do not need to take anything other than your normal daily vitamins (which for me is a prenatal, vitamin d, now calcium and magnesium, cod liver oil and protandim).

So, I made it 5 days. No gluten and no sugar, no wine, nothing.  Day 5 I had a piece of chocolate cake. Day 6 some chicken tenders and beer.  Day 7 it just went down hill fast.  I pretty much binged on sugar for the next week.

I thought that I didn't loose any of my belly flab, but when I reintroduced sugar (read:stuffed my face) my belly almost instantaneously got bigger, flabbier, and more bloated.  If I could have stuck with it for a few more weeks, I know I would be prancing around in a two piece right now.

Those 5 days taught me a lot.

I now notice much more how shitty gluten and sugar make me feel ( my lymph nodes get swollen, I feel waves of extreme fatigue and irritability, and nasal drip and congestion).

I think my yeast is much stronger than I realized.  I also think that I am a much more of disordered eater than I realized.  For me, that means I rely heavily on food for emotional nourishment and to de-stress.

So I need do some more emotional work to get my head in a more stable place before I try this again (maybe its the yeast making excuses!)  I have been doing a new treatment for the past two weeks and I really think it is making a big difference. It's something called Trauma Release Exercises, and it is awesome. I will tell ya'll about it soon.

Back to the drawing board I go. Just putting one foot in front of the other.  At least going in the right direction and praying that one day I will quit my sugar addiction for good.

If anyone wants to do some more research, here are some good links that talk about how awful sugar is for you:


Insuline Resistance


Stop Sugar Cravings

Guide To Natural Sweeteners


Intestinal Belly Fat and Yeast

Child Yoga: Donkey!

Donkey is the next stage of advancement after your child has learned Down Dog and later mastered. It's such a fun yoga pose for your child.  The pride they feel when they can accomplish it, is priceless.

So just like any other pose, you show them the pose first and then ask them to do it.

For Donkey, you show them Down Dog first and then say "lift your leg for Donkey!"
You can say; "What does the Donkey say?  He says Hee Haw!

This is the child version of one legged Down Dog, but when you show them, lift your leg slightly and keep it somewhat bent.  They are not going to be able to do a perfect one legged Down Dog, so show them the version of the pose that is attainable to them.

And remember, however your child express this pose or any other pose, is absolutely perfect. They are perfect, their little bodies are perfect, their individual gross motor skills development is perfect just as it is.

As long as you are breathing, you are doing yoga!

Just FYI, most of the baby yoga poses I post, I learned at my Itsy Bitsy Yoga training. The founder and creator, Helen Garabedian, has a great book and dvds that you can purchase to help your home practice. Or you can go to her website and try and find a class near you!

Natural Easter Egg Coloring

While the food dye industry continues to assert that food dye's have no correlation of hyperactivity in children and whole host of other negative impacts, I for one, do not believe them at all.  Just a few weeks ago the Huffington Post came out with an article about how the FDA is looking into changing their official statement on food dyes. If they do, it will be the first thing the FDA has done right in awhile.

In the meantime, lets just go with our guts.  Food dye can't be good, can it? How can anyone think  ingesting something that is bright orange or bright red is OK?  You couldn't pay me a million dollars to give Penelope Gatorade, or jello, or goldfish or store bought Popsicles. 

So I sure as shit wasn't going to dye our Easter Eggs with Red 40.  No ma'am!

I bought three bottles of natural food dye from our local organic grocery store.  They are all created naturally, for example the yellow was made from Turmeric.  Which you can do on your own (click on this link! it takes you to the cutest foodie blog), but I got too busy to make food dye from scratch.

Instead of hard boiling the eggs, I blew out the egg yolks.  I have a farmer deliver eggs to my house every other week, for myself and some of my friends.  I had a few extra dozen one week and I didn't want them to go to waste. So I thought, perfect, will use them for Easter Egg coloring! 

While this way worked, and I have a nice display of long lasting colored Easter Eggs, it was a pain in the you know where to do. I ended up pricking my holes a bit bigger, and thus you can see them very well, to make it easier to blow the egg yolk out.

Also, when I was dying the eggs, they were so light from having nothing in them that I had to hold the egg down in the liquid with my fingers.  Which is hard to do, when you are doing this a with a toddler in her learning tower and she wants to simultaneously break all the eggs and splash colored water all over the kitchen!

I mixed the yellow and blue to make green and the red and blue to make purple to give me a total of 5 different colors.  Here is a good link with the recipe for the coloring. You basically just need vinegar and water.

And since I used farm fresh eggs, as you can see, they are not all white.  The brown eggs did get some color but not nearly as much as the white eggs.  But I actually like how they turned out.  They look exactly like what they are; Natural Easter Eggs!

Then we took the leftover colored water outside for some finger painting fun.  And Penelope decided that dying her brand new Pottery Barn cloth baby doll would be much more fun.  Either that or she decided that it was not cool to have all white baby dolls and that her baby doll collection needed some diversity.  :)

This Moment: Belly Flab

Oh, man, this is kind of painful.  Hopefully it will hold me accountable and help inspire me to eat less sugar.

Basically, this is what eating cookies every day looks like.  I eat very healthy and make sure to meet my nutritional needs, but I have a serious sweet tooth. 

I have no words for this one.


Well, at least my arm looks ripped in this one.

How to Make Homemade Cream Cheese

Making your own cream cheese is so freaking easy to do. And it's one of the first things you need to learn how to do, in order to have your own supply of liquid whey, which is needed to make your own fermented drinks and food.

First off, watch this video to get a good idea of what to do. This video is where I learned how to do this, she gives you everything you need to know.  She's my guru.

You MUST only do this with RAW MILK. It will not work with regular, pasteurized milk. Raw milk sours and is still very good for you to consume, pasteurized milk goes bad.  Check out this page for more info about the benefits of drinking raw milk.  If you are local, you can get raw milk from New Leaf Market.  You must ask for it and they go and get it for you from the back. It has a sticker on it that says For Pet Consumption Only.  Do not be alarmed, its the farmers way of not being held liable to the FDA.

First you pour your sour milk into a container, or just leave it the milk container it came in, and set it on the counter to clabber (it's your vocab word for the day!) for 24 to 48 hours.  If your milk is not sour to start out with, it will take much longer.  Keep your eye on it.  When it's thick and chunky, it's ready.

 

Then you pour the chunky, clabbered sour milk into a clean (with non-toxic detergent), rag and tie it up with a string or rubber band. Then you hang the rag up somehow, I just hooked the rubber band over a cabinet door knob, and let the liquid drip out into a bowl.  In Nourishing Traditions, they have a crazy picture of the rag tied to a wooden spoon held over a glass pitcher...but this is MUCH easier.

What drips out is whey. Once the dish rag is done dripping, you open it up and you what's left over is cream cheese! Every time I do it, the cheese tastes a little different and the consistency is different, so don't be alarmed if yours doesn't look like mine or Sarah's. 

You can eat it plain, but its a little too different than store bought for me to eat it straight, but I like it with strawberries or nuts and a little maple syrup with a slice of bread. I also use it plain in baking and cooking when a recipe calls for cream cheese or ricotta cheese. Delish!

Then you bottle up the whey, I use a mason jar, label it and put it the fridge.  It will last about 6 months in the fridge.

This post is apart of The Healthy Home Economist's Monday Mania.

 

Benefits of Baby Yoga

From the book, Itsy Bitsy Yoga, by Helen Garabedian, the Top Twelve Reasons Why Babies and Toddlers Need Yoga:

1. To help them sleep better and longer
2. To improve digestion and ease gas pain
3.To turn fussiness into happiness
4. To promote a healthy, physically fit lifestyle
5.To strengthen the parent-child bond
6. To increase neuromuscular development
7.To cultivate self-esteem and positive body image
8. To boost the immune system
9. To reduce stress and develop relaxation techniques
10. to reduce anxiety
11. To increase body awareness
12. To aid the natural development of movement from birth to walking

2 Minute Mama Yoga

Got two minutes?

Good! Do some yoga!

Full hour yoga classes are very few and far between these days. In truth, I have been to one, count em, one yoga class since I was pregnant. BUT I try and do yoga in small snippets whenever I can.


I like this little routine because its super fast and effective in relieving any tight back muscles.  It's basically a standing variation of down dog, cat/cow and cobra, which makes it a great routine if you are pregnant too!

First, start by holding on to the back of your couch, or table, or counter, or whatever the hell you want-as long as it can really hold your weight. Then bend your knees and put your weight into your heels, and move your bottom away from the couch, giving your shoulders a nice stretch, and warming up your back and legs.  Sky, the healthy doggie, likes to participate in yoga time too.

Then straighten your legs and press your chest towards the floor and your shoulder blades together. 

This is a modified Down Dog. Your feet should be hip distance apart. The more you drop your chest down, the deeper the stretch will be.  Make sure your back is flat.  You can experiment with the intensity of the stretch based on how far away your feet are from the couch.  The more you move them away, the deeper the stretch will be in your calves. 

And make sure you are breathing!  As long as you are breathing you are doing yoga, no matter what your body looks like in the pose.

The next pose is a nice side stretch and stretch for your spine, such a great stretch if you have a tendency to carry your baby on your hip. You are making a C shape, or a crescent shape, with your upper body. Stretch on one side and then the other. Use the the couch and the floor for resistance to get a deeper stretch.

Next is cat/cow. The picture above is of cat pose, its called that, because you arch your back up like a scared cat. Tuck your pelvis under and move your chin to your chest. Again, use the couch and the floor as resistance. You should feel a stretch all down your spine and in between your shoulder blades.

For cow you keep your hands on the couch (or you can put them on your knees) like you have been and bring your pelvis to the couch, so your hip bones are touching the couch. Your legs are pretty straight, but can have a bend in them if that is more comfortable for you. Your elbows are bent and your shoulders are down, rolled away from your ears. You are looking up at the ceiling. This is a great stretch to open up your chest and shoulders.

Now go do some yoga!

Baby/Tot Yoga VIDEO: So Big!

 This is a video of Penelope doing her first yoga pose all by herself!  It's called So Big.

The way you do it is you sit on the floor with your legs together and feet pointed up towards the ceiling.  Make sure both sits bones on are the floor (your sits bones are the bony bottom part of your pelvis).  You can feel those bones better by rocking side to side slightly.  This pose is a modified from the adult yoga Staff Pose.

Then raise your arms up over your head, as if you are trying to reach the ceiling.  Your spine is nice and straight and you are looking straight ahead at your child.  When you raise your arms, you say "SOOOOO!!!"

Then you bring your arms down and try and touch your toes and say "BIIIIIGGGGG!!!"  I do it pretty dramatically, as you can see in the video and make a thump on the floor when I bring my hands down.

It's a great stretch for Mama's.

For a baby Penelope's age (9 months) or older, till about 20 months, you alternate between showing them how and helping them by raising their arms for them and bring them down for them, as you say
"SO BIG!!"

If you have been doing yoga with your baby since they were born, like us, this the time yoga gets really fun and exciting.  You can really start to play and interact with your baby at a different level.  Its so amazing to watch them learn.  Their little brains are like sponges!   They are just so smart and absorb everything you do and say.

Penelope will do So Big if I prompt her or she will just randomly do it when she is playing the floor with a toy.  All of sudden she busts out the yoga and makes her mama proud!


Check out the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyVxwHkWJys

And let me know what you think about the video!  Do you like it better than pictures for our weekly yoga tutorial?


The one today was kind of haphazderly planned.  She was doing it and I grabbed the camera real quick.   If you guys like it, I can do more videos, but spend more time on the explanation of the pose in the video.

Just FYI, most of the baby yoga poses I post, I learned at my Itsy Bitsy Yoga training. The founder and creator, Helen Garabedian, has a great book and dvds that you can purchase to help your home practice. Or you can go to her website and try and find a class near you!

Fig Pie

Remember the blueberry pie post I did a few weeks ago? Well, I did fig version recently and it was AMAZING! The figs were from a local farm.


















peeled all the figs and that took forever! Then I chopped them up like so. I only sprinkled a bit of sugar on them, like the recipe calls for, so its a very naturally sweet tasting pie.

I am still learning how to roll out the pie crust made from scratch. So my pie crust topping is a little kooky looking. Whatever. It was delicious.

Liquid Gold: Homemade Chicken Stock

A few weeks ago I made chicken stock from scratch. While I was making it, I was thinking how similar homemade stock is to breast milk. You know how people say breast milk is liquid gold because its so nourishing? Well, homemade chicken stock is like that as well, and it really looks like liquid gold. The cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, quotes Ageless Remedies from Mother's Kitchen, when describing chicken stock, saying it "heals the nerves, improves digestion, reduces allergies, relaxes and gives strength.



















Its also very tasty. Just yesterday, I was doing my Once A Month Cooking and I made Chicken Pot Pie with some of my broth. I have made the dish before, but this time using my own broth, it was much more flavorful.

When I made stock before, I froze it in large mason jars and it was really cumbersome to store, defrost and actually use the stock. Back then we didn't have a deep freezer so that was part of the problem. This time I went about it differently and stored them in plastic bags.  That way, you can freeze them flat like bricks and they take up less room in the freezer.   I did several 3 cup bags and lots of 1 cup bags, so I could just pull them out as needed and not waste any stock.

Here is the recipe from Nourishing Traditions:

1 whole free range chicken or 2 to 3 pounds of bony chicken parts ( I used pieces from 4 chickens and doubled the recipe)
4 quarts cold filtered water
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
 2 carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 celery sticks, coarsly chopped
1 bunch parsley

Place chicken pieces in a large stainless steel pot with water, vinegar and all vegetables except parsley.  Let stand 30 minutes to an hour.  Bring to a boil, and remove scum that rises to the top.  Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 6 to 24 hours.  The longer you cook the stock, the richer and more flavorful it will be.  About 10 minutes before finishing the stock, add the parsley.

Remove chicken pieces with slotted spoon.   Strain the stock into a large bowl and put in the fridge till the fat rises to the top and congeals.  Skim off this fat and reserve the stock in covered containers in your fridge or freezer.

Cornais Family Pizza

I found this recipe in a magazine several months ago and tweaked it a bit to make it our own.   It has become a family favorite and we make it at least once a month.  And now that Penelope is trying meat, she gets to eat a little bit of everything on the pizza, except for the goats cheese.  Remember the pizza I was talking about on my first post about Once a Month Cooking? Well, this is it.

It is so yummy. And healthy. And substantial. It will fill you up and leave you feeling satisfied.  And it is EASY to make!

This is a picture of all the ingredients:
-pizza dough (I buy the pre-made dough at Publix, they have a white and multi-grain and we use the multi-grain. I have also used the sprouted whole wheat pizza dough from New Leaf, but its not as good as the Publix dough),
-a pound of ground beef. I almost always use organic, grass fed beef.
-mushrooms. I started out using only one container, but they cook down so much and I like lots of veggies on my pizza, that I started using two.
- a can of chopped tomatoes, or one big tomato chopped up.
- one onion, chopped.
- a package of goat cheese. Usually I use goat cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy, but this time I just grabbed a random brand from Publix when I went to get the dough.

First you saute the onions, then add the mushrooms, till they are fully cooked and tender. Then you set the onions and mushrooms aside and brown the meat in the same pan. I flavor the meat with a meat spice mix that we bought in Miami at Norman Brothers. Once the meat is browned, you add the vegetables back in and also add the tomatoes. Mix all together. Then put on top of your pizza dough. Lastly, add the goat cheese. I just drop little spoon fulls all over the pizza. Goat cheese does not spread when cooked, so fill in all the spaces of the pizza with cheese now.  I never put enough on, so be generous!  Bake in the oven, at whatever the directions on the pizza dough say. Usually at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

And enjoy!

Baby/Tot Yoga: Moon Toe!

Penelope is growing up!

We have recently started to only do Tot yoga poses! She no longer wants to be on her back, whether we are doing yoga or a diaper change. A lot of babies naturally do Moon Toe as a part of their body development. If you see them doing this on their own, say "Yay! Moon Toe!!" and you are a head of the game, as far as word association goes, in teaching them how to do this pose on their own.












































To start, you put them in your lap, facing out. Then gently hold their toe out, like so. Eventually, you want them to grab their foot and then you move their legs, but when they are just learning the pose, they usually don't grab their foot. Once you have moved them into position, you sing/say "Moon Toe!" You go back and forth, doing the pose on each leg.












































Then you can do "Double Moon Toe!" By bringing both feet out.

You also want to show them how YOU can do the pose.

Especially for older tots, who will not let you "move" them into the pose and only want to do it themselves. It's a great stretch for Mama, but if you haven't stretched in a while, don't bust your leg up fast. Be gentle with yourself, until you are more flexible, and bend your knee if you need too. Once you have your leg up, say things like, "Watch Mama do Moon Toe!" or "Mama's Turn!" and then you would say to them, "Now, its your turn!" Don't be discouraged if it takes awhile for your baby to pick it up on their own. Repetition is key. Eventually they will get it, and then you wont be able to get them to stop!

Just FYI, most of the baby yoga poses I post, I learned at my Itsy Bitsy Yoga training. The founder and creator, Helen Garabedian, has a great book and dvds that you can purchase to help your home practice. Or you can go to her website and try and find a class near you!

July Once A Month Cooking

This month I made four different meals, similar to last month. I made Mousska, Chicken Enchiladas, Chicken and Walnuts, and Minestrone Soup. All recipes can be found in the cookbook, Nourishing Traditions.

The Mousska came out great, but preparing the eggplants was a little time consuming, so if you are making it by itself it would be fine, but to do it on a big cooking day like me, its not the best choice. Its the first time I have ever cooked with lamb, so I was proud of myself for branching out a bit.

The Chicken Enchiladas, came out very tasty, even though I forgot to mix in the spices. Using chicken from a roasted chicken, instead of baked or grilled chicken breasts, makes the dish so much more flavorful. I roasted 4 whole chickens at the same time, and later made a huge batch of chicken stock (tutorial coming soon!) And again, taking the meat off of four whole chickens to use for my recipes, was also super time consuming. Not that time consuming is bad, it usually indicates a nutritious meal, but its something to consider when planning your big cooking day.

The Minestone soup came out so-so. I used orzo instead of rice, because I had it on hand and I had never cooked with orzo before and I wanted to experiment. I ended up using too much orzo and the dish was very thick, not a soup consistency at all, but the flavor was good.

The Chicken and Walnuts was my favorite! You marinate and heat up the chicken in a pomegranate sauce. Super yummy. Next time, I am going to incorporate more pomegranate and sprinkle some pomegranate seeds on top.

Here is the recipe for the Chicken and Walnuts. I hope this ok, and I am not going to get in trouble for publishing this without permission..does anyone know the rules on that?

Chicken and Walnuts:
meat from 2 cooked chickens, cut up.
2 cups crispy walnuts
2-3 cups chicken stock
2-4 tablespoons Rapadura (I just used organic sugar)
12 ounces pomegranate juice
sea salt and pepper

Put walnuts in food processor and grind. Mix with stock, pomegranate juice and Rapaduara. Heat up slowly and simmer for about a half of an hour. Season to taste. Add chicken meat to sauce and simmer about 5 more minutes until chicken is warmed through. Serve with brown rice (we ate it with cous-cous instead).