sunday afternoon

Easy lunch. Even though besides studying Nutrition for next week's exam there's nothing that has to be done - I have a lot of time on my hands, my laziness brought a very nice little déjeuner paresseux into being: a slice of sourdough bread with store-bought hummus and green (organic ;-)) beans from a jar with a little sea salt. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
After that my boy and I split the last of the sugar-free chocolate muffins I made - they were yumm. And then there was green tea and a spelt cookie (full serving suggestion credit goes to Simon) and the sound of Hollywood dinosaurs in the next room.

Ironically enough I've just arrived at the chapter about the chemistry and types of sugar. DESPAIR.

My morning was spent watching this film, thanks, Tavi. I know it was far from your intention and it was far from mine, too. PS I don't know how you do it, writing so many positive comments to the pictures you provide, I mean ???????. I'd also like to point out that dissing SJP is so very last decade.

what I ate today (sugar-free diet)

A diet completely free of sugar is not an easy one to embark on, but once you've become used to it and you've found replacements to "bad foods" that are both healthy and which taste really good, you will start to feel better than ever. Ever since I've had to do this (and I have to do so regularly) for the first time I've noticed a huge difference:

- Fatigue? Non-existent!
- Mood swings? Nope. No more.
- Bloated? Not at all.
- Hungry? Nuh-uh.
- Over-eaten? Never.

I want to share with you what I've eaten today, not to bugger you into going on the same strict diet, but to 1) support those who have to, 2) tackle conventional nutritional rules and 3) give some helpful advice to those who do feel tired, depressed, bloated, hungry and over-eaten.



Breakfast: 1 apple, 1 banana, 3 dried dates, 4 scoops of probiotic yoghurt - usually at breakfast we also have 1 or 2 cups of freshly brewed Japanese green tea and a glass of unsweetened cranberry juice (I look forward to this breakfast every single day!)

Lunch: large bowl of home-made soup (celery root, Roman cauliflower, carrot, onion, with unrefined sea salt) and two slices of whole wheat sourdough bread with butter, two lettuce leaves

Little snacks at work: mandarine orange with a couple of cashew nuts and dried cranberries, a piece of dark chocolate (sweetened with stevia)

Appetizer before supper: 3 corn cakes with mayonnaise and sea salt

Supper: home-made soup (Brussels sprouts, carrot, celery root, onion, sea salt), 4 stems of steamed broccoli, a raw carrot and some lettuce with mayonnaise and a couple of walnuts

+ lots of water


It does not seem a lot, probably, compared to the enormous amounts of food many are used to. General nutritional advice also tries to convince you that you need at least 2000kcal a day to be a healthy woman. In the beginning I was worried too when I read what I could and could not eat, basically the only things that I could eat were fruits and veggies... The 2000kcal is a misconception which I do not even have to back up with scientific evidence. I dare you to try and find it out for yourself which would make you feel more energized: living one whole day on bread, cheese, meat, crackers, etc. (starch and protein) or fruits, vegetables, nuts (natural sugars/carbohydrates and some good fat/protein)? Rest assured, I too have felt desperation after reading that from now on I could only eat stuff from the last group. I thought it was going to be boring and impossible. Six months later and I could not imagine going back to my old eating habits. I have lost some weight, which troubled me at first, but once the scale kept showing me the same weight, I felt relieved. Don't let calories scare you, if you eat enough "living" plant matter, you won't have to bother about counting kcals.

It's not so much that I have to practise what I preach and feel inner frustration about this - been there, but rather a matter of necessity. It may sound unbelievable, but I could and would like to eat like this for the rest of my life. It's very hard to make this clear to others. My brother will for example still ironically refer to my not eating meat any more, assuming that I'm gnawing at the door jamb 24/7 because I can't have a bloody peace of meat!!!, but I must say I have more or less become indifferent to it - there are of course exceptions such as Christmas parties where you almost have to shove the meat back off of your plate if you don't want to have any (grannies just don't get it, vegetarianism).
I cannot begin to describe how good it feels to have all those fresh vegetables on my plate every day. (I will quickly add that I eat eggs too sometimes, and small amounts of cheese occasionally.) In a way it brings you closer to nature again, away from processed factory food.

The menu you've seen above is how I more or less eat daily (with different fruit and vegetables), and the foods are all organic. When sugar is not completely forbidden, I do like my cookies and a piece of chocolate cake from time to time, some crisps here and there and a nice latte when I'm out with friends. It's not my choice to live completely ascetic, but I do stick to the basic principles of healthy eating, just because it makes me feel much better than the regular Western diet does.

A note on mayonnaise, because I know it tends to ring the alarm bell in some people: what could be bad about mayonnaise? The fat? The eggs? Cholesterol, you say? Your liver makes cholesterol daily, the equivalent of 6(!) egg yolks, 'nuff said? People who have been diagnosed with "high levels of cholesterol" are generally people who eat too much starch, protein and sugar, or people with leaky-gut syndrome and the like. Some mayonnaise or fresh butter won't drastically increase the amount of bad cholesterol in a person.

PS: My apologies for being slightly too concise at times, it's hard to cram all side-thoughts and explanations into one easy read. I'm trying to keep it light and interesting.

panama blue for a penny

€1 + cheap mylittleponyesque earrings to match

I was thinking I might post a "weird outfit a day" (although week will be more suitable) sort of thing to get that inspiration going again, i.e. not standing in front of my wardrobe every morning just gawking at it for 15 minutes without moving, but actually grabbing things quickly and getting it right again most of the time. I feel I've lost it, and so the daily picture could be a good exercise...

they're here

Four of my demos.

soundcloud.com/evelien-vs

apple cakes without sugar

These just came fresh out of the oven!
I'm on a sugarfree diet (health reasons - not going into that in this post), and obviously for a pie/cookie/chocolate/coffee with milk and sugar/crisps/... lover like me that's a small disaster. I can't take anything with milk either because of the lactose and crisps/fries/... are forbidden too, because in the gut starch is modified to sugar. Obviously no alcohol either, for the same reason. Wheat is a standard no-no for me, hence the almond meal as you will see.
I'm trying to make life a little easier by delving into old and new recipes and learning more and more about healthy baking. And what's even more important, the occupation itself gets my mind off the sugar!

For 6 little cakes:
200g almond meal
2 organic eggs
6tbsp apricot jam
2/3tsp baking soda
1/2tsp vanilla powder
1tsp cinnamon
15-20 drops of liquid stevia
50g coconut oil
20g butter
1 large apple
some cranberries

Mix the almond meal, eggs, jam, vanilla, cinnamon, stevia, coconut oil, butter and 3/4 of the apple. The butter will soften as you stir (with a fork). Grease the baking form(s) and sprinkle some almond meal in them (makes removing the cakes really easy!). Put the mix in the form and cover with pieces of apple and cranberries, and some more apricot jam if you like. Bake 25-30 minutes at 175°C.

With lotsa small Flower Remedy bottles. 40 to be precise.

The organic food shop sold their last bottle of brandy... to me! The time has come, I'm going to start experimenting with the composition of Bach Flower Remedies. (The flower extracts are preserved in brandy 40%.) School told us to start with self-treatment, so I'll have to start thinking which of my personality traits/moods need a good scrub. Oh yes, I do have an idea.


With eerie pikturs.

I love this book. It's a reprint of Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery's Atlas of Anatomy (1831-1854), who at the time worked together with Nicolas Henri Jacob, the illustrator who made the amazing hand-coloured litographs for the treatise. Some plates are a little scary, especially the ones covering surgical directions of the time - sometimes you wonder what exactly that weird object is doing in that bared skull, and the settings look pretty sadistic here and there, but their 23 years' time of hard work and careful observation did pay off.

And here's apparently the complete (huh??) online version of Gray's Anatomy (of the Human Body), my initial inspiration to get myself a book with 19th-century anatomical plates.

The Anatomy classes start in only a couple of weeks...

in the newspaper

I have just discovered that Belgian 15 to 25-year-olds these days dream mostly of becoming famous CEOs, more than becoming famous pop stars or sports players. Apparently the increased interest in this quite incomprehensible ambition (to me at least) is due to the media attention given to people such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zucherberg. Well then! I wish for them that there be enough companies to be head of.
Maybe we could start an actual company that employs only CEOs, or companies could make their staff rotate, so that each month someone else gets to be CEO.
I'm so allergic to this word.

So who still wants to work here, for a normal wage? There's not enough money for so many superdeluxe lives, you know!
But that's OK, you all go be the famous CEO you wanna be, I'll be the famous pop star (well, someone will have to).

What was more interesting was this cute thing below, the Brookesia micra, which has only just been discovered. 29mm. That's not even a fourth of an inch, is it?

hard gaan

Dude (excuse my French), this is, as we would say in colloquial Flemish, "hard gaan". This song doesn't even need a second play to receive my approving last.fm love-click. It's INSAAAAAANE! OK, second time, go.

raw food - EASY!

I was just gobbling up a really lovely little quinoa salad and thought I'd share the recipe with the world. Well, recipe, you just clean vegetables, chop them up and throw the bits together. I've been trying to eat more raw things for quite some time, especially with warm dishes for this reason (digestive leucocytosis, sounds worse than it is and you can calm it down by eating some raw vegetables before/with a meal).

1) wash quinoa, boil 12 minutes
2) boil an egg, 10 minutes
3) wash some lettuce, celery, carrots, alfalfa, parsley + chop up or grate if you like
4) mingle
5) add whichever you like: wheat germ oil, olive oil, mayonnaise, yoghurt, ... and some sea salt

And there's your daily portion of raw goodness.
Enjoy.

PS: a note on raw eggs, 'cause I hear some of you shouting that my egg isn't raw. Never eat raw egg whites. You can have a raw yolk any time, but the whites should always be cooked.

free your mind

The easiest way to free your mind nowadays is to close your laptop's lid.

wie bent gij en wa doet gij

"I am the mother of a developmentally delayed daughter, Leslie. I am married, and live with my daughter and husband, Walter, in ******, Georgia."

How would you define who you are in two lines? Who or what are you going to include in this concise description?

People need and want to be able to make an outline of themselves. Either the outside world asks them to do so in order to make an introduction, or they simply need a summary of the self as a way of rooting, taking a clear position in the world. Just as we cannot walk around without identity cards, we cannot go through life undefined. No one is able to remain a complete blank. First of all, because we cannot avoid or escape building up a certain curriculum of references - even a one-minute-old has them: parents X and Y and its place of birth, second, because for most of us there is an instinctive need to cosily curl up in the lap of society.

It is interesting to look at the possible choices for composing this personal abstract. Some, as in the above example, do this by means of relatives and home town, while others will use their jobs or flourishing careers and mention the company they work for. Which leads me to a subject I've been meaning to write a little word about.

Junior Product Specialist
Associate Consultant
Master International Business Economics and Management
Sales Manager Benelux

Namely, that more and more of the people I used to go to school with are now clear-cut products of a world dominated by companies. The above four are people of my age and this is something my innocent mind is not quite able to grasp - insert mental image of little man in a small room running to and fro in a desperate manner, thereby constantly crashing into the walls, exclaiming "WHY, WHY, WHY". I'm not delving into the explanation of why this is so hard for me to understand, let the job titles (note the widespread use of English for more credibility!) speak for themselves. And PS, what the hell is a Services Delivery Manager? My guess: someone that rotates around his own axis all day? A delivery guy, like, I order a service and he brings it to my door in a flat cardboard box? Titles can be so absurd. Where have all the milkmen gone? I suppose they've all received a laptop, a mobile phone and a company car and went for it.

As for myself, sometimes I would just like to respond that I am "Evelien, I live, and have been doing so for the past 25 years - occasionally enjoying it", especially since I hate being asked what I do for a living; I prefer not to be identified with my source of income. However, I too was born with an instinct that makes me make use of any given opportunity that comes along to subconsciously mark my territory, f. ex. I am a vegetarian, id est, meat eaters, abstain! Up until not very long ago I used to tell people I was an artist, but I've adapted my virtual visiting card and wiped that word off of it, instead simply naming some of the activities that I happen to be occupied with. (Of course when you look to the left, you will see that I'm not being entirely honest.) Which is more truthful: I sometimes play music, which may from time to time lead to the birth of an actual song. I am on the path to Naturopath, now, who knows perhaps I will quit at some point? And I do not work for a company - at least, that is what I tell myself each day before rushing out to the metro station to get to my reception at 8 o' clock prompt for half a day's profitable slavery.

Whahey, have you also noticed it's Saturday? Time for breakfast!

F#m A F#m A C#m D

I nearly blinked away a tear with this video - no sarcasm. The weird changes of accent and tone colour are perfect. Artists don't always have to sound exactly like they do on their records. This is the charm of live performance, there's a real person behind this great song, who even though she had a lot of success, still feels a little uncomfortable in the limelight. Don't diss! Dissing is for people that have their noses sticking to a screen 24/7.

I fell in love with this song today and that's late maybe, since I've know it since its release (thank you FB friends, there's always someone in there discovering things the minute they come into being!). It's like suddenly noticing that you like a certain somebody just a little more than you thought, even though you've known them for a while.
Hope I can still focus on my own songs a little tonight, got my head in a F#m cloud.
I want Lana's low voice.

And hair.

I can no longer use Photoshop. Just the very basics I remember, but none of the fancy advanced stuff I've learned in college. It's all gone. I'm hoping to retrieve it from the back of my mind at some point. It's embarrassing to have a Photographer's diploma in one of my drawers - God knows where, in between a stack of manuals and scrap paper most probably - and not being able to turn a simple path into a mask.
Well whatever, at least for today.

Today I have been studying Bach Flower Remedies. Yes, that's right. Those small bottles with flower extracts you've all heard of, but never really trusted. Maybe you've used Rescue Remedy once before going to an exam? That ring a bell, yeah?

To be honest with you, the philosophy behind this discipline is incredibly fascinating. It delves into the human mind so deeply that it makes you feel uncomfortable merely studying the different remedies. The motives that lie at the base of our decisions, our need for or aversion to exchanging thoughts with others, social contact or a tendency towards withdrawal from social contexts, eagerness for the new or fear of change, all are subtly defined by personality and it is extremely important to position yourself as a good listener when treating someone to accurately define the source, the root cause that stands in the way of balance. Unlike what I thought before, this is not just some flower pleasantry, not some playing about with little expensive bottles. Edward Bach was an admirable man with sharp observational skills and mastering his remedies is not for the quickly disinterested. We will be given this course all throughout our naturotherapeutic education.
Above all it gives a good insight into the people that surround you as well as an elevated sense of self-awareness.

And here's a picture to go with my writing. Pictures are important. Not everyone likes to read random rants (I usually skip those too on unknown blogs). Not that this picture is particularly interesting. FULL STOP.

souvenirs from K20

1) Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 2) Sonia Delaunay, Coat made for Gloria Swanson, 3) Franz Kline (1957 - Oil on canvas, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf)

I find it funny to have found the one Franz Kline I'd seen and liked at the Düsseldorf K20 museum, considering this. That Google search did take away the mystery. I still cannot decide if I admire people with such dedication for one very specific way of painting or if they make me feel as though I'm staring at a line worker's career overview. They are certainly good art history material, the ones with the highest level of persistence: if it weren't for them we wouldn't have so many "movements" to study in our art classes. Surely the concept of movements is both intriguing and necessary for/to the human mind which will always involuntarily prefer that which can be easily divided into categories and then neatly organised into neurological structures - makes looking up info so much easier. On the other hand, an ultra-specific and dedicated Kline may have reached the full potential of his black strokes at the end of his life and leave planet earth/art history a few really striking works, while artists such as Gerhard Richter who try to cover a broader spectrum of styles risk ending up having touched upon everything and nothing at the same time.

a mint little monster

Happy in my newly-thrifted mint-coloured gold-buttoned wide-shouldered wool coat.
I cannot seem to find second-hand coats my size, or trousers, or sweaters, or anything. Therefore I will always remain the girl that was worn by her own clothes.
And look ridiculous(ly happy) in them.

Also, I feel much like this in it:



PS: Clicking "next blog" must be the most boredom-inducing thing I have done in the past ten years. Previous blog possibly agrees with me. Ouch!

vegetarian supper?

Why not make:

The Greasy* Salad
leaf lettuce + alfalfa + a glug of both wheat germ oil** and olive oil + some mayonnaise + some crushed garlic + all kinds of nuts and seeds (crushed golden flax, remember?) + green herbs + unrefined sea salt

Pumpkin Vélouté
For 2 hungry individuals: chop up half a small pumpkin (the size of a little toy ball? mm), two carrots and an onion. You can add some parsnip too, which adds a lovely earthy taste. Steam until all vegetables are soft, then slowly add more and more water, be careful not to add to much. Mix before adding more water to see if you like the soup's consistency. Add vegetable stock to taste.

Quiche Of The Season
Steam parsnip + sweet potato + any form of cabbage + two onions, very lightly (about 5 minutes). Knead 175g of spelt with 75g of butter, three tablespoons of water and a dash of salt into a firm dough. Flatten dough and put into a quiche pan, make holes with a fork. Bake 10 minutes at 180°C before adding the vegetables. After adding the veggies poor a mixture of two eggs with a little crushed garlic over your quiche. Bake for some 30 more minutes.

For Those Who Miss Summer Dishes
Chop up wintery veggies ad lib: parsnip, brussels sprouts, cabbage, celery/celery root, beets, turnip, fennel, ... + carrots, mushrooms, potatoes and onions, which are available all through the year. Grease an oven dish with coconut oil. If you do not live in a tropical region, your oil will be solid. Hint: when cooking the accompanying rice hold the dish above the boiling water until the cocoa butter melts into a nice colourless oil. Hint 2: start cooking the rice right before putting the dish in the oven if you're using brown or black rice, as I would recommend :)
Fill up the dish with the vegetables. Heat up half a litre of passata, add spices to taste (a glug of portwine is really nice) and poor over the vegetables. Put slices of mozzarella on top and sprinkle herbs over your dish (including oregano!). Bake for 30 minutes. YUMM!
Brussels sprouts need more cooking time, you can steam them a little beforehand (or just eat them crispy).


Serve ANY dish with the greasy salad for your daily dose of leafy greens.
Soz for the lack of picture material. All has been tried, tasted and approved!
Enjoy.

* we aren't rabbits: uncooked leafy greens are harder to chew and hence to digest, that's why you need to soak them in grease, so they stay in your stomach longer! ha! don't fret, oils aren't the things that will get you fat!
** wheat germ oil is loaded with vitamin E, good for your skin, nudge-nudge

This picture(*) is seriously freaking me out.

(*) The Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia by Mark Newman

That second thing is me looking at aforementioned picture, wearing three layers (thick sweater stolen from my bf + thick sweater + not kidding) and sitting next to something that looks much like a toaster. A sauna/hammam/jacuzzi session at the local sports centre today has done us really well. Truly pore-opening. Since Wikipedia told us nudity is compulsory within the Benelux, we first tried to get in covered in just a towel. I advise all other sauna newbies to check the centre's nudity policy first before trying to enter - although the sauna staff's faces are priceless when ur doin it wrong.

can you believe this?

I was sad to discover this next message in my inbox this morning and decided I might as well share the news with you:

Japanese tsunami fund 'used for whaling programme'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16064002

http://blog.seattlepi.com/candacewhiting/tag/minke-whales/
"Why Japan Is Prepared To Battle Over Whaling - Their Other Agenda"
Eye-opening article, if you're interested to know more.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/japan_disaster_funds_whaling_b/?vl
Petition to force Prime Minister Noda to use precious relief funds to save people, not kill whales.

______

Shocking news is always just a little more shocking when you know what the victims look like. Here's the creatures they're after: minke (1), humpback (2) and fin (3) whale, respectively 935, 50 and 50 whales per season.






The playful behavior of humpback whales is well known and has even been mentioned in classic American literature. Herman Melville, using the character Ishmael as his narrator in Moby-Dick, said of the humpbacks that they are "the most gamesome of species and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water than any other."
Source: Seapics.com

wot shud I put on me sammich then

You've probably heard people talk about it and you have most likely ignored it for facility's sake: milk and meat are not good for you.

For most of us, it's a scary statement that renders a wide range of questions and worries. There are ensuing questions which I will gladly answer, and there are questions I'm getting quite tired of, two of which are:
* How can I replace dairy?
* What should I put on my sandwich?

I will answer, however, why I won't answer them.
Because 1) plenty of books have been written about the more popular questions that spring to the average omnivore's mind and 2) in my world, they've become useless. Now that does not mean I'm up there in my ivory tower looking down on those who don't eat well. It just means that I believe I'm not the soft-approach type of person. Cold turkey, ice bath, face the truth. And we'll have to, if we want to get to 15 billion self-proclaimed omnivores without having to gnaw at each other's hams n' loins because the meat supply has become insufficient.

What that whole eating-well idea really boils down to is bringing about a huge change in thought pattern and overthrowing current habits. Bread, pasta, wheat, starch = no more than stuffings. Protein = propaganda (I promise I will clarify that at some point, but in the mean time there are many good articles available that will put forth many more arguments than I ever could at this point, for example this one.)
Especially when you are trying to recover from a certain illness, your diet needs to be 80% veggies/fruit, period. If that looks strict or impossible, try making it a daily goal. If you don't meet that goal, that's fine, as long as you can bear in mind that the base of your pyramid - contrary to popular belief - should be fruit and vegetables.
So pile on the leaves, fruits, stems, flower buds, seeds, buds, roots, bulbs and get happy. Or get over it, as I would say to some.

It's fairly easy to please people in their plates, what's harder is to meet their nutritional daily needs. I find it tragic to see those star cooks get awarded and rewarded for preparing food that does not even surpass the level of pleasing taste buds. What I would like to see is someone capable who's able to put people on the right track. Someone who knows how much omega-3 fatty acids I need everyday, where I can find them and how I can squeeze those into my daily food rituals. Maybe someone who can inform people about what are the good fats in the first place? Because omega 3 may now ring a bell for some, since fish oils have been commercialised, but these fatty acids do not necessarily have to be derived from animal source. For example. (Answer: in my morning ritual a spoonful of golden flaxseed is included, f. ex. plain white yoghurt + fruit + golden flax (which you ground right before using them), providing 2.1 grams of ALA - alpha-Linolenic acid, one of the omega-3 fatty acids. Why ground? Ungrounded flax will merely pass through the digestive tract, since the fluids there aren't strong enough to break down the seeds to get to the fats.)

As vegetabletarians, our fridge is permanently stuffed with at least seven different seasonal vegetables. I'm no 5-star cook, but I know how to improvise with the fridge's contents. It's pick-and-prepare: for each underground veg you pick two that have grown above the ground. Sounds weird, huh. Just believe me for now and throw in some coconut milk if you like, and many spices. Make sure the greens aren't overcooked, but rather lightly steamed in a little bit of water if you don't have one of those steaming machines (I don't!). Never bake things in vegetable oils (huhh what?? LATERZ, it's bloody half past eleven), but use them cold in salads. AND CHEW WELL, 40 times at least - also future-article material.

This shows I'm not a professional writer as I'm too impatient to post this article-thing and it hasn't even turned into a well-funded coherent writing yet. And my sleep goes above all.
Good night, nice recipes soon.