The importance of berries for health cannot be overstated. If you can pick berries where you live, do so!
Here in down-east Maine, raspberries are gone, but blackberries are just starting to ripe in the sun after several days of rain. Every late afternoon, we are going for a walk along the road and pick and eat, pick and eat. Nothing better on Earth!
And most important: Blueberries are upon us! My husband likes the big, cultivated ones; I favor the little ones from the wild. Does not matter - all are good. In Europe, we had another kind of blueberry, namely bilberry. It differs from the varieties here that they are blue through and through - meaning that all the valuable anti-oxidants are even higher. Besides anti-oxidants, they are loaded with vitamins, cholesterol-lowering fiber, bone-building manganese, and so much more. Their anti-inflammatory potential are legendary - they fight cancer and diabetes, arthritis and infections. Eat them now while they are plenty and cheap.
Here my favorite recipe - as usual with me, not much of a recipe, but just throwing the goodness in a bowl in abundance. Add a small teaspoon full of coconut milk. The fat helps absorb fat-soluble vitamins (like vitamin A) which would otherwise just pass by, unused. We have this for a breakfast.
And then again for desert after dinner. Late in the day, a splash of rum over the blueberries and the coconut milk makes it even better (not if you are an alcoholic!!). Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
My Eyes Were Resting On Green
August 11, 2011
Yesterday I drove from Vermont to down-east Maine on Route 2. During the first part, my friend Bob guided me through tiny back roads from Vermont into New Hampshire to Route 2; if you ever have to follow another car like that, it helps if it is a fire-truck red pickup truck that you can’t lose out of sight easily. That bright red truck was the beginning of the color game for me when I later sailed across gentle hills east, east, east for seven hours. Since I took up Chinese brush painting in January, my eyes are drawn by lines and colors.
After the bleak, beautiful scenes of the two barren, forbidding deserts we visited this year – Namib and Gobi – I reveled in the green landscape that sustains me - body and soul. Green were the meadows, the lily pads on the ponds and the forests of maple, pines, firs, spruce and sumac. Saturated, satisfying green.
A few colors were sprinkled into the green canvas: rows of orange Turk’s cap lilies, a patch of tall yellow sunflowers, a surprising line of bright red tractors at a dealership, pink roses and big swathes of rosy fireweeds, an occasional blue mailbox and clouds of dainty pale blue flowers that might have been hardy geraniums, the subdued red of barns, brown male flowers uppermost on green cornstalks, the purple loosestrife that invades the boggier areas, the black ruins of a burnt-down house, and of course the white houses, steeples and picket fences we all expect from New England. Natural colors and man-made colors – but all insignificant against the green on the hills and in the valleys.
Many of the small towns along Route 2 were decorated with American flags red, white, blue, making a contrast to nature that seemed to say that the “United States” is a concept, and idea that deserves effort and commitment rather than growing organically out of the soil. Something that easily could be swallowed by fertile green if we don’t pay attention.
Gentle rain and creative fog formations wrapped the land, nourishing and renewing. We know, of course, that Nature can come upon us with force and destructive. Not here, not yesterday, though.
Green, of course, is our most wholesome food. When I arrived at the log cabin, tired and hungry, I began cooking a pot of fresh cat food for Otto from ground beef, chicken livers, some rolled oats and dripping wet dandelion greens from the garden. Then I thought the better of it and saved a few pieces of chicken liver for the humans: I browned two big onions in coconut oil, added a sliced Braeburn apple and a handful of green dandelion leaves, and pepper and salt. Last I added the few slivers of chicken liver. A meal for the gods!
During dinner conversation, my friend Matt said the sentence: “I make sure that most of the time I am not too far away to touch a tree.” Read More