Girl after my own Heart

My daughter watched, perplexed, as I sliced up a red pepper that I splurged on at the grocery today. It was just so....red, and I felt I needed more red in my diet today. :)

She finally spoke up, inquiring "Where did you get THAT thing, when there's snow on the ground outside?".

My first thought: She's a girl after my own heart. She knows food doesn't grow here this time of year--and that it grows on plants!

My next thought: The poor thing is so deprived not to have a regular diet of peppers in the middle of winter! (Not!)

My afterthought: Busted. I went against my "buy only from the US" with this pepper: it's from Mexico.

But I will enjoy this extravagance anyway. We had a good little talk afterwards about where they grow these things when we can't and how they get here to our grocery stores so we can buy them.

Book Review: FOOD RULES An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan

It probably comes as no surprise that I am a fan of Michael Pollan's books and his ideas about food: Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much. The book FOOD RULES An Eater's Manual elaborates on this idea.

Though I did fairly well during the holidays at avoiding pure junk, I figured I could definitely use a reminder of what I really want my focus to be on. So, I picked up FOOD RULES at the library.

This book is an excellent quick and easy read. If you had a dedicated hour/hour and half to read, you could probably make it through this book in that time. Or, you can do like me and take it in little snippets of time here and there, because it is written in small parts that are easy to stop at and not completely lose one's train of thought. Whichever way you approach it, if you care about what you eat, you will be pondering what you've read for days. :)

The book not only tells the reader what NOT to eat ("edible foodlike substances"), it also steers the reader to what we SHOULD be putting on our plates and why.

All in all, it had just what I was looking for.

Some of my favorite rules I want to apply this year:

#4 Avoid food products that contain high fructose corn syrup (not necessarily because it's GMO or has a good chance of containing mercury, or even because it's sugar, but because if a product has this ingredient, it's pretty much a guarantee that it's highly processed....and not good for you.)
#13 Eat only food that will eventually rot
#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
#20 It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
#21 It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language (ie. Big Mac, Pringles, Cheetos, etc)
#25 Eat your colors (and we're not talking added colors here)
#27 Eat animals that have themselves eaten well (as in, eaten what they were created to eat: not GMO grains/soy)
#30 Eat well-grown food from healthy soil
#31 Eat wild foods when you can
#32 Don't overlook the oily little fishes (anyone have good mackerel/sardine/anchovy recipies?)
#33 Eat some foods that have been predigested by bacteria or fungi
#38 Favor the kinds of oils and grains that have traditionally been stone-ground
#42 Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism (ie. soy milk, soy "vegetable" oils, soy in processed foods, etc, not to mention GMO's)
#44 Pay more, eat less.
#46 Stop eating before you're full. "To say 'I'm hungry' in French you say 'J'ai faim'--"I have hunger'--and when you are finished, you do not say that you are full, but 'Je n'ai plus faim'--'I have no more hunger.' That is a completely different way of thinking about satiety."
It's the same in German.
#56 Limit your snacks to unprocessed plant foods.
#60 Treat treats as treats.
#62 Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don't.
#63 Cook


Whew! Hope I can do it! :)

Personality Tests--I'm an INTJ! What are you?

Personality tests are a good tool to help you understand other people and where they are coming from, and perhaps more importantly, understanding yourself.

I took this test today and my result was INTJ: Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging

There is a lot of truth to this testing; I found it to be quite enlightening! I encourage you to go take the test and see what you get, then google your type and see what else you can find.

If you are an INTJ, chime in! There are few of us in this world and we need to stick together! :)

One rather humorous site I found in relation to INTJ's is here (has some mild language): INTJ Central
If you're looking for basic stuff and not a lot of humor, there's this one: TypeLogic INTJ

I encourage you to take the quiz yourself and see what you get--you might be surprised at what you have to learn! :)

What I'm Reading in 2011

On a board that I frequent, people are talking about reading 52 books in 52 weeks this year and blogging about it. I am not certain I can handle another blog dedicated to just that, so I decided that my approach to this would be to put a list off to the side on my blog here of what I am reading(see below right) and ever so often I will write a bit of a book review.

I have no idea how many books I tend to read in a year, so part of this is to keep track for a year and see how many it comes to. I am going to count books I read cover to cover(like novels), as well as recipe books and other such books that one might refer to but not approach in a "read-cover-to-cover" manner.

Stay tuned for my first review!

Deter Mice with Peppermint Oil!

As you may know, we live in a 100+ year old farmhouse in the country. And anyone who has lived in an old house knows that Mouse Problems tend to occur off and on.

I have tried many things to either keep the mice away (I *thought* I filled all the holes they could get in at...guess not!) or kill them(when regular snap traps didn't work for an extra-gingerly-eating mouse, a small stretchy hair band wrapped around the trigger and carefully baited works better). Before anyone goes off on me for not live trapping and relocating the mice....I would be doing that quite frequently in the fall/winter and I just don't have time for that! It's not that I've never done this(I have), but it's not something I want to add to the daily chore list.

I have read about using Peppermint Oil to deter mice, but was pretty skeptical about it and used other techniques instead.

Until the last time the varmints got into my silverware drawer/cabinet that I had just cleaned out! That is soooo aggravating, not to mention gross!

So, in desperation,  I got out the Peppermint Oil and cotton balls. I put 3-5 or so drops per cotton ball and put them at the back of each of my drawers in the kitchen.

Guess what? So far, NO sign of mice in the kitchen! Yippee! And when I open the drawers, it smells like Christmas!

I assume I will have to refresh the cotton balls ever so often, but am thankful that (so far) it is working.
(and my hubby got me a live mouse trap to put on the kitchen counter just in case--much better than a snap trap)