You are currently browsing the daily archive for February 26, 2009.
My 11-year-old daughter, Christy, was very mildly oxygen-deprived at birth. The doctor tells me this is why she has 20/20 vision in one eye and 20/200 in the other. We were clueless until she was 6. We knew she had horrible handwriting and had trouble knowing what a clean dish or clean bedroom looked like. It wasn’t until one evening she was sitting on my lap with her head turned almost completely sideways to see the book I was reading to her that we decided there was a problem. The eye doctor said she was too old for exercises or any possibility of improvement and that glasses were our best option.
I just returned from the eye doctor. As of a year ago, her vision had not improved since the initial checkup at age 6. But today the doctor came out with a wide grin. “I don’t know how, but her eye seems to be growing! The cornea, the lens, the optic nerve are all showing signs of…I don’t even know what to call it. Growth? Regeneration? Improvement, to say the least. She still needs the glasses, but she can actually see out of them now, better than ever. We never see this kind of rapid improvement in a child past age two. It’s just a miracle! Can you bring her back once a month for a while so I can watch this?”
Absolutely! How exciting! My heart is doing back flips just to think that something measurable in one of us is changing and improving. There has been nothing different in our circumstances other than the testing of nourishing foods during January and a full-scale commitment in February. That there might be changes already—actual, measurable, verifiable, medically relevant changes—is staggering to me.
This post is part of Natural Cures blog carnival, hosted by Hartkeisonline, and Prevention, not Prescriptions.
One of the things I love best about this foodstyle is that the meals are cooked so quickly. I’ve never been one to stare at the fridge at 4PM and throw together a culinary delight. No, that would be Blair. She’s creative and instinctively knows what food flavors work together. Me? Not so much.
But, I’ve got my menu plan, my rice is soaked, I know I have all the ingredients and Nourishing Traditions is open to the recipe page and in the cookbook holder (nifty birthday present, that.) So, after a morning trip to the eye doctor with Christy and an afternoon trip to the dentist with John, it’s a short hour until dinner.
First order: start the brown rice. Because it was soaked overnight, it will only take 45 minutes to cook up fluffy and soft. My store didn’t have fresh wild-caught salmon this week, so I bought some frozen Coho fillets. Coho is denser than Silver or King Salmon, and doesn’t have the same delicate, layered flavor. I made a marinade/salad dressing with some sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, chopped green onions, grated ginger and minced garlic and marinated the fish in a 9×13 pyrex baking dish in about half the marinade for about 20 minutes, then put a piece of foil over the top and baked it at 400° for 20 minutes because it was still partially frozen. Fully thawed it would have only taken about 10. By the way, the marinade is terrific to sauce up the cooked rice, too. While the fish marinated, I scrubbed and shredded six carrots, and tossed them in a bowl with a half a bunch of chopped green onions, a new little green bell pepper from my garden and used the other half of the marinade as salad dressing.
While I was out running errands, Kate found this recipe for homemade chocolate candy I’d printed out and whipped up a batch. We usually have dessert on fish day to entice reluctant eaters, but I had totally forgotten to get anything together for that. What a wonderful surprise to find these little fudgy buttons in the fridge! They were very good, too. They were softer than I was expecting, more on the order of fudge than candy, and so very good. The kids said they weren’t quite “right,” (that’s what they say when something is really good and they want it again right away) and we needed to test with some mint extract once, and could we find a way to test with raspberry and cherry, too? In my house of food critics, that’s a rave review! Thanks, Kelly The Kitchen Kop, for the great recipe!
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
