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| Image courtesy of www.quinoasalads.com |
We have been using quinoa grains for nearly a year now. We stumbled upon it at Costco and always intrigued by new things, we bought some. What a fascinating little grain! You can simply sprout it in water or steam it like rice, which we do, in our rice steamer. Here is what we did last night.
Greens from the garden:
- Baby red lettuce
- Broccoli Raab tops
- Arugula
- Baby Wild Kale
- Onion flowers
- Chervil tops
- Celery leaves
*We really just walk around and snip a bit here and there, but this is an equally lovely salad even if you buy your favorite fresh salad greens at the grocery store. I get a kick out of growing it myself.
Quinoa Salad:
- ~2 cups of cooked or sprouted and drained quinoa
- Cherry tomatoes, as many as you like, cut in half
- Finely chopped chives or chive/onion blossoms or spring onions, to taste
- Cilantro, parsley, mint or chervil, finely chopped
- 1 peeled and diced purple or green Kohlrabi (you can use jicama, radish or any crunchy root veg, like carrot)
Coconut Vinagrette:
- 1/2 c coconut oil
- 1/4 c white balsamic, apple cider or plain white vinegar
- 1-2 tbsp of your favorite mustard
- 2 tsp of Tuscan Italian seasoning (we use the Costco one, it's awesome for dried seasonings)
Toss the quinoa salad together and drizzle a little coconut vinagrette over the salad, not too much. I like to drizzle a little dressing on the salad greens, too, but do what you want.
Nothing fancy to this really, it's just a lot of beautiful fresh greens piled on a plate, add a bit of the quinoa salad on top and dress it with your favorite dressing.
A note on Coconut Oil:
I have been researching all the wonderful properties of coconut oil for it's medicinal and antiviral benefits. I have been using it almost exclusively in place of all vegetable oils, which can go rancid. I'm seeing some remarkable improvements in my own body.
Rancidity leads to free radical damage in the body, which leads to cancer, heart disease and any number of seriously bad illnesses and environmental diseases. I've been systematically removing all food and beauty products with mineral, petroleum and vegetables oils from our household and I was shocked to see just how much I buy without actually understanding what is in the label.
If I could evangelize anything, coconut oil might be that "thing" but I'm to lazy to preach, so I will leave you to research the terrible facts of oxidizing vegetable oils in the diet and how making a simple change (based on science and an understanding of how the body metabolizes fats) can dramatically improve your health, not just prevent disease. A book entitled "The Coconut Oil Miracle" by Bruce Fife is not a gimicky, preachy book. It is well researched, based on science and scientific studies and the implications are so profound that I began to dig a bit deeper.
I recently kicked soy out of my diet. I love soy and I thought it was the miracle I had been looking for when I believed dairy to be the culprit of my sudden adult asthma. Turns out, soy was the real culprit. Soy was in everything I ate, even things I didn't know had soy. I had been eliminating soy from my diet starting late last summer. Earlier this year, while watching PBS, I saw a commercial sponsored by the American Soy Association on behalf of Dairy Farmers in Minnesota.... The commercial touted, "Did you know... that if you consume dairy from Minnesota, you are actually getting soy in your diet because Minnesota dairy cows are fed a diet high in soy?" Something just clicked for me. I thought my milk was causing my asthma because it was dairy... but suddenly, I was doubtful.
I started reading every label that went into the cart: soy this, lecithin that, soy, soy, soy, soy, OH BOY! I had replaced cow's milk with a soy milk, without realizing that I was likely OD'ing on soy. Soy is in everything and if it isn't made with soy, it's made with corn. Remember those posts I made a while back about all of my soy milk and okara recipes? I wasn't just OD'ing on soy, I was amplifying my asthma to such an extent it became chronic.
I was so excited to embrace soy that I didn't actually do the homework first to see if it was something I could tolerate. The moral of the story, my asthma became so bad, I had to take matters into my own hands. My doctors were content that I had asthma, prescribed me steroids, an inhaler and a seasonal allergy medication I had to take everyday.... My gut told me it was a food allergy because I've never had asthma a day in my life until 2005.
I can't say my experience of eliminating soy is what did the trick. I can't even say "eliminate" because soy is now so pervasive as to be in everything; I can only try to limit it. Regardless, I took a try at being my own good doctor and guess what? I've not had to use an asthma inhaler in over a year!! It's coming on the dead of summer when my "asthma" should be at its worst and I'm elated!! I breathe better, no chronic cough, phlegm, attacks, allergies, NO NOTHING!
After reading Bruce's book, which highlights how soy came to power in this country, a lot becomes clear. One only has to look at the facts, at the evidence all around us to see how we got to this point. Big Agriculture is truly changing humanity. And not exactly in a good way...
I am not a doctor. I'm not an activist. I'm just a person trying to take responsibility for what goes into my body and the level of care I need to take to protect it from all of the environmental and physical stresses it has to endure just so I can write this, share with you, my own experiences. It's too soon to tell if Coconut is a miracle, but it makes my skin feel soft. I don't have acne breakouts during my cycle any more and I have not had a skin infection since I began to use it. Even better, my asthma is a plague of the past.
Be responsible. Do your own research, use your best judgment and when in doubt, question EVERYTHING, especially your highly paid and inattentive medical doctors.
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