Green Sunday on my mind! | by Mariella

The reason why you didn’t hear from me last week was because I had nothing to say! I was in ‘do’ mode, with a week to go before our food Market opens and so so much to finalise, the only thinking I’ve been doing has been the full-steam-ahead-toward deadline kind. But one strategically placed day can disarm that crazy autopilot and that day was yesterday.

If I could have taken a colouring in pencil and coloured yesterday in on the calendar, it would have been green. Green kept making cameo appearances! It started with green juice. Green juice made to order! My husband and I had two different needs, he’s got ‘The cough’ that’s going around and I had a homemade rusk episode yesterday which would be of no consequence if I weren’t in the process of doing away with an insulin intolerance issue.

I juiced lettuce, nasturtium leaves (good for sore throat and coughs), mint, whole lemon (try it, just juice the whole thing, you won’t regret it!), ginger, Californian poppy petals (we have so many!) green beans (breaks down insulin), coriander (good to get Mercury out of the body).

I poured enough for myself and then juiced a bunch of pears (alkalizes) for my husband and mixed the balance of the super greens mix in with that. Mine was great until I had a sip of his! My son loved his too, which was a big surprise as it was still a mean mix.

In between all this I was going to make our yoghurt for the week but when I poured the milk into the pot it had already turned sour. I considered throwing it out but then remembered a friend telling me she had made Paneer, an Indian cheese prepared much like you would prepare haloumi, out of sour milk and it had worked well.

 Normally you bring the milk to the boil and add lemon juice to it and then wait for it to separate but it just separated on its own.

I waited for it to separate completely, removed it from the heat and poured it into a pillow case over the sink.

The whey drained through and once the cheese inside had cooled enough for me to handle; I left it in the pillow case and kneaded all the whey out of it.

I put it in the sink and then placed a heavy pot full of water on top of it to compact it nicely and left it to drain.

It came out solid and perfect and it was so easy to make. It also freezes very well.

When making it with fresh milk I usually keep the whey and freeze it in ice trays. It can be used in smoothies, added to cooking rice or in any sauce to add flavour. Millet cooked in whey is so yummy.

I then worked on the table for my market stall as I too shall have products to sell. My partner found an old wooden crate and as I am getting into carpentry, I volunteered to up-cycle it and design a table top for it which ended up Green! With the help of my coughing husband, I finished in time to head to the Harkerville Lookout to celebrate National braai day with family! 

Harkerville is a forest reserve on the cliffs looking out over the ocean. There are several single track cycle routes through dense indigenous forests and many hiking trails that zigzag along the coast. It’s a magical place. And as we passed under the boom I felt something happen in my system that I could only liken to the process of photosynthesis, the trees receive energy from the sun and I felt my body’s answer to being in the presence of green lush trees as a deep internal setting to let go of the static electricity I’d generated around myself all week and at the same time received this beautiful transfer of life force from the trees! 
I felt so clearly that this was the optimal state for my body to operate from, that ‘relaxation’ is not a luxury but the natural default setting of our bodies. We ran down to the coast and up a rocky staircase before lunch, a mere three kilometres but I can feel those steps load and clear! To be surrounded by all that green was what I needed to recharge for the week that lies ahead of me! The next time you feel the need to ‘Go pick tomatoes’ (see ‘The Ultimate in Stress management’ post) make them green! It’s the new black!   

A little on broad beans | by Mariella

      

Harvesting food from my own garden is such a rewarding experience. It calls to the hunter gatherer in me. It’s so satisfying to return to the kitchen with enough food to make dinner. It’s like harvesting effort, and it’s so simple, you put the time and work in and you get food out.

Last night’s food started out as little green shoots in a row of 5 litre bottles. Because we have a cutworm problem in our garden, we put bottles over all of our seedlings until they are strong and their stems are thick enough to not be cut down in their infancy by these voracious nocturnal predators!

If left unchecked, cutworm can level all of your seedlings and your hard work in one night. If you run out of 5 litre bottles, cutting any bottles up into rings and using those works just as well for cutworm, but because we have snails as well, we use the bottles. A few still get in but it's controllable 

Yesterday we had our first harvest of broad beans. The plants have come up in what I refer to as our mega area, a space in the garden where everything we put in the ground grows to at least double the size! Our broad bean plants are standing at just over a meter and are heavy with new beans.

We love broad beans best fried lightly in butter with a bit of salt. But yesterday we had them with Swiss Chard out the garden and some roasted sunflower seed and they were yum! My mother-in-law makes a delicious broad bean and pea soup.  

Not everyone is familiar with broad beans, they are easy to grow but not available in most supermarkets. The next time you see them I would strongly recommend trying them out. Because they are still green they take 5 minutes to prepare, they are a good source of fibre, Protein, Phosphorus, Copper and Manganese and are truly delicious!

My visit to a Chinese Doctor / Mariella

As a result of several tedious health issues that have arisen over the last year, I am currently undergoing operation fix-me-up. I have lined up some therapies I resonate with and it all looks rather promising. Today I went to a Chinese doctor.

I completely overlooked the fact that a Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Doctor uses needles, long sharp needles, and that this could possibly constitute a problematic situation as I have an aversion to needles, even the small unimpressive kind, let alone the Kung Fu Panda variety that lay in store for me on the other side of the wall. This all slowly settled over me as I dutifully filled in my form in the waiting room. His receptionist interrupted my roost to escape through the bathroom window to inform me that I could go in. I was trapped and not about to make a scene, so off I went, like an animal…to the slaughter!

The Doctor before me didn’t seem inclined to do me any harm. He was rather friendly. I sat down and gave him my list of woes, among them; years of bad stress management and a ganglion,a very painful cyst formed from the tissue that lines a joint or tendon, on my wrist. He listened, checked my hand,  my pulse, my tongue, said I shouldn't eat chicken (interesting as I hadn’t mentioned my blood group, which apparently doesn't handle chicken very well at all). He then asked me to lie on the bed and attached a bunch of strange suction cup thingies on my back and left the room, they got hotter and hotter. 

I started to think about how I had to collect my daughter from a soccer match in twenty minutes and it suddenly seemed like I may be a little late! He came back a while later, removed the cups and horror of horrors, the ominous sound of something being removed from sterile packaging rang in my ears! He rubbed my shoulder and without so much as an ‘On Guard’,stabbed me with a needle! If that weren't enough to completely finish me off, he wiggled it around a little.

Whoever says that acupuncture doesn’t hurt, needs to have their nerve endings checked!

     

He did this twice, and then he asked if the ganglion was in my right wrist. I thought for a moment about making a run for it, in my bra, with needles poking out of my back to the car, or maybe just directing him to the wrong wrist, the one that isn’t already sore. I reminded myself that I was a consenting adult and was the one who had made the appointment, I lifted my right hand. 

He stabbed that needle right through the ganglion! He then wiggled it around and asked if it hurt. It felt like a mini epidural going all the way up my arm and you will never understand how one feels unless you’ve had one. ‘Yes’, I said. He then left me there, like a pinned moth, for whatever needed to happen, to happen. I have to say, once those needles were in, they didn’t hurt too much.

When he returned again I informed him that I had to get to school to pick up my daughter and he said,’Yes, yes, almost finished’. What followed reminded me of those Kung Fu movies where the Ninja, clad in black, steps out of the shadows undetected, and snaps the soldiers neck without a sound. It honestly felt as if he had decided that my head was a liability and the source of all my problems and it had to go! I felt my spine stretch all the way from my neck to my coccyx; he then confidently coaxed the kind of neck snapping, vertebrae crunching sounds out of my neck that you would expect to hear before the baddy drops to the ground, and then attempted to remove my head once more. ‘This no massage’, he said,’ This is ….(A name I couldn't possibly pronounce), this open all Meridian’.  

By the time I left everything hurt, I was so rattled that I forgot my medicine behind and almost got lost on the way to the school where my daughter and her friends were the only ones left. But now, a couple of hours later, I feel fantastic, like my meridians are open! I shall have to google the implications of having open Meridians but it all sounds favourable! I have not, however, had the courage to move my wrist yet! It’s swollen and blue, and I have no idea if that’s good or bad!      

Thank you India! / Mariella

I remember when I first heard “Thank you India”, by Alanis Moressette. It was one of many little hooks sunk into me, pulling at me impatiently. It took me another fifteen years to get to India. 

The White Temple, Jodhpur

It was for work and a little play and because we only had three weeks, we elected to stay in one area. This area was Rajastan, the land of kings, a desert realm of ancient palaces and home to the descendants of the warrior clans. My husband goes once a year and I hid behind him for a few days after we landed, I was terrified! The systems by which the nation conducts its daily business stupefied me! But then something started to happen, something in that head wiggle wiggled its way into me! The tight grimy streets began to carve themselves into the fibre of my being and the character of the people engraved itself into my sense of humour, my smile, my faith in humanity. How so many people can live in a country struggling under the weight of itself and still smile, laugh, sing, dance in the streets, haggle you out of every Rupee in your wallet, rejoice, pray, carry on in faith, embrace you and include you amazed me.

Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur

Here are a few facts about Rajastan:

-Taps drip and so do toilets, the only thing to consider is where they drip from!

-Hooters hoot.

-Shops are open between 10:00/11:00 am and 8:00/9:00 pm.

-Cows will eat trash more readily than old papads.

-The solid line in the middle of the road is treated more as a serving suggestion than a road rule.

-Indians have rocks, will build walls. They have been built everywhere and for no apparent reason, there are high walls, like the wall of China, climbing vast mountain ranges and disappearing into the distance, there are low walls criss-crossing through the sparse dry forests and between villages. India is held together by walls.

Pushkar, A view of the Holy lake from my window

Romantic Udaipur, the Venice of the East!

There is an iconic exchange for everyday that we were there, such as the conversation with our auto-rickshaw driver who, after negotiating us through a donga in the middle of the road in the middle of the night said it better in his crackled English than anyone could, ‘Oh my goodness, this is a very mountain road!’, or the gentleman who has known my husband for years, confiding with arms outstretched, ‘this man is like a bother to me!’.

Having gone from the lofty mountain shrines around Pushkar to the Romantic lake temples of Udaipur, I think I found the heart of India in a small home at the base of the mountain upon which Jodhpur’s magnificent Mehrangarh fort stands. The day after we arrived in Jodhpur, we decided to take the road less travelled by. We walked through the streets until contented by how utterly lost we had gotten ourselves! We headed roughly up the road intending to possibly approach the fort from the side and find steps going up. Once the road became a winding path in the shadows between high blue washed buildings we found the last houses built against the rock face itself and here there were children playing. A boy, with large bright eyes yelled, ‘Come, come!’ We followed. 

He led us to a cerulean blue building built from the same stone as the cliff face, which turned out to be his home. We were greeted with many smiles and immediately food came out of the cupboards. We gladly accepted, all the while thinking, eeck, my tummy’s not strong enough for home cooked food in India! They watched us eat without joining us. 

We spend the entire day with this boy and his family in their small home at the base of that overpowering rock, they showed us the small temple they care for, the well they tend, a hole in the solid stone, which took two elephants to empty. We looked through wedding albums and did each other’s hair! Before we left, the boy’s mother, whose name is Kishan, said to me, 

‘You Englishstani, me Hindistani, but blood is same’

I thanked her, and sent her photos after, if it were appropriate to hug her good bye, it would have been a very long hug!

Kishan, on left, and her beautiful family 

On the way to Kishan's house

India is a rising star, and change brings with it shabeens in taxi ranks where there was once no alcohol at all, technology almost as quick as the kids and a direct link to the first world, but walking out of that blue house with a family of farewell waves at my back and a packet of leftovers in my bag, I felt like a desert nomad, stepping out into the setting sun, with my eyes set on the horizon and an ever elusive ancient world to discover.