Thurs, Aug 24

Breakfast was a smoothie. 

In my "catching up" posts I said I had started adding hemp protein to the smoothie. When I finished the bag of it I got from Marshall's, I got a proper container of it via Amazon. Here's the brand and nutrition info:

Lots of protein, fiber, and amino acids! I only use 1 tsp, rather than the 4 Tbsp serving size indicated. 

I also have started using fermented strawberries - 1/4 cup each day. Not fermented to the point of being alcoholic, but just enough to break down most of the sugars and leave the fiber and other nutrients intact, plus of course add all sorts of good probiotics. Here's a link to a page from Cultures For Health talking about fermenting fruit:

https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/natural-fermentation/introduction-culturing-fermenting-fruit/

I use finished water kefir as the starter and have been adding a spoonful of honey, as per a recipe I found here:

http://nourishedkitchen.com/fermented-mixed-berries/

But I think I'm going to leave the honey out of the next batch just to see what happens. 🤷‍♀️

Anyway, here's a pic of my finished strawberries. They are tart and delicious in my smoothie! I bet they'd be awesome mixed into yogurt or served over ice cream! 

I also mentioned that I was fermenting some figs. Brianne got a small bag of small figs from a customer on her training mail route, so I cut them up and puréed them along with an apple I had. They were bubbling happily away today!

I will leave them to bubble overnight, then put them in the fridge tomorrow. I might use them in tomorrow's smoothie!

I had a light lunch today, just some cheese and mixed nuts, and I didn't feel like eating dinner. It's not good that I didn't eat dinner because now my tummy is growling while I'm getting ready to go to bed. 😕

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Morning weight, Aug 24

Aug 1 - Aug 23, 2017

 My weight pics for Aug 1 - Aug 23. Again, I don't have them from every day, but here's what I've got:

I made some ferments & sprouts.

black mustard seeds on the right, juniper berries on the left (to add to the finished mustard)

beans soaking for sprouts

2 jars of jicama, fermented strawberries, and a jar of figs + an apple

fresh home-grown figs with one apple

leafy green sprouts, carrots + daikon, another attempt at garlic-dill cucumber pickles (turned out yummy!), and water kefir

water kefir and strawberries

water kefir, strawberries, and beans soaking

 I made dinner:

turkey medallions, carrots, dilly green beans, peas, zucchini, in chicken broth

crock pot pork roast (shredded), with carrots, sprouted beans (soy, peas, black-eye peas), konbudashi-pickled mushrooms, plus some bouquet garni herbs

beef with carrots, sprouted beans, and sesame seeds

Our house is not very big, so storage is at a premium. I was getting frustrated with all my jars just sitting out on the counter, so Brianne got me a set of shelves to store them on.

I bought some of that new-fangled charcoal tooth powder and it does seem to make a difference!

I replaced our Canada flag - the old one was faded and torn up by the wind.

We took in our recycling. One of the items we brought in was a 10-foot long section of copper tubing for one of our swamp coolers. It had split over the winter (guess we didn't get it drained in time). Copper is valuable and it brought in almost $5.00, which helps offset the cost of the new one we had to buy. :-/ 

I watched the eclipse from inside the camera obscura that Brianne made for me.

I picked some juniper berries from the backyard bush.

One of the things I love about the desert is the wildlife.

This is the lizard that lives on our front porch. 

4-foot long gopher snake in our backyard. The first one we've seen in the yard since we moved up here 2.5 years ago!

A close-up of the snake.

a hawk in our front yard tree, scaring the bunnies away

BUT, we've had entirely TOO MUCH wildlife in our house recently!!

found this huntsman in a box of pencils in the office

pencil-box huntsman 

found *this* huntsman in the bathtub!!

bathtub huntsman again

This Yellow Sac Spider fell into my aquarium and drowned. Was NOT expecting to see this! LOL

Roof rat (Rattus rattus) that was in our house for a few days. Used an electronic trap to electrocute it. Put it outside over the fence onto the undeveloped portion of our property. It was gone a few hours later. (I suspect the ravens ate it.)

a comparison of a roof rat (Rattus rattus) and a Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus).

Hopefully I'll start remembering to take morning weight pics and posting regularly again!

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