The Way: Tea

Today I am very thankful for tea. Coffee has not lost it’s place–just love that fructose detox it brings–but tea has firmly cemented itself into the routine as well. The real genesis of this summit push was making the tea that kills oral bacteria, oat straw, chamomile, and raspberry leaf are an excellent combo to start. Then adding cardamom, orange peel, stevia leaf, cinnamon, fennel, star anise, juniper, hibiscus and more…If you’ve been reading you know just why and how!

Now all that tea is decaf, great because caffeine with food is not wise for the nutrient loss–alas there is caffeine to be in the tea too. That comes in the form of both green tea and, maté having more caffeine than coffee, green tea a little less. All in all this allows me to regulate Linda’s activity level based on the caffeine as well as stimulate my own for various tasks.

I find a little tea really does get me up for tasks like I have to do now go see how my latest solution for pee stained clothes is working. This is the first time I’ve tried the full vinegar, oxy-clean, hot water which seems to be the trick. We’re a cleanup day (today) and a sanitation day (tomorrow) away before I’m even going to do a famous big Willie bird on the grill.

Tea is a saving grace though truly. I’m stoked to have found a really cool little market where I get goods from my favs Ortiz Farms and Triple T Ranch.  There’s an excellent, delicious tea seller–tea and trumpets–at the Santa Rosa farmers market at the Veterans building on Wednesday mornings until 1:00. The teas are mainly from India, which at this point I feel safer about than China with it’s nearly totally polluted ground, or Japan with the serious radiation threat. At $3 and 4/oz that’s really not bad for organic teas either. Drinking a jasmine green now that’s delicious.

What’s best about mixing coffee and tea too is you don’t need as much tea. The other decaf herbs make the base, then the green and maté gets added. The tradition of tea is a very worthy one to have as well. I’m now diligent about keeping water hot on the woodstove, two kettles, one for drinking one for washing water, at all times it’s the best on demand water heater I could ask for. Both on the stove overnight–adding some nice humidity to the house–keeping the water at perfect temp for tea, just under 200. Put it on the cook stove with a trivet for a sec to a boil, shut it off, and coffee water is right at 208 for the time it takes me to grind with the manual method.

There’s salient truth to the English tradition of not mixing coffee and tea in any vessel or cup–purest–but I am a total sinner. If there’s a little coffee and solids left at the end of the day I put it in the caffeine pot, which preserves it well, and makes the whole blend like a chicory tea, if I need a quick pick up first thing in the morn that tastes quite good, then I’ll throw it out and start over.

Also stoked to have found a couple old pots, no new China thank you. The brown kettle is an English Stafford, and the yellow is a beautiful Bauer, Los Angeles.

The Way: Making Caramel

Envision a sweetness unlike any you’ve ever tasted before but this is not a yam, nor any heavy carb item that will caramelize easily, this is a delicious yellow-orange fleshed vegetable. The final results look like this:

Nothing–and I do mean nothing–will caramelize as easily as natural wood coals, Oak in this case is a wonderful wood. As is Ash, probably the best all around, then Apple, then all your various meat related hardwoods like mesquite, but in my ranking, the wood from our region her in N. Ca is exceptional quality cooking wood. In basically the same latitudinal region in Italy, same climate as us in N. CA, are famed for their charcoal making families. There’s a certain density to our wood that’s superior. Here’s my setup, a dual French loaf, cast iron pan (Yes you could do this in an oven with varying results depending on how hot you can get your oven):
I can fit both halves of the squash in each loaf side, sideways works well, slightly arched over the top, but getting the heat exactly parallel with the side is the goal, accomplished on the left side as you can see the top is black.
The right side squash I flipped at the end to really get the carmel on both sides:

So I encourage all who dare to find a similar way to do this on just a standard BBQ, no grill, just the fire pit, you can buy chips, the rack you choose, as simple as a couple small V-racks could work, anywhere a little natural wood smoke is allowed, which really should be everywhere, but for the other pollution…

The Way: Sourdough Pancakes

Never thought I’d be making such unorthodox sourdough pancakes. However, when you realize that frying high carb foods such as wheat flour based pancakes can have deadly results, it doesn’t mean there’s no way to do it.

The biggest discovery is that the homemade almond milk which is really just nuts and water will start to ferment and form hooch on it’s own, and it gets supremely sour pretty quickly. In the fridge it’s about a week before it starts, so at room temp it would probably work in a couple days.

For this batch I used a beet base, flax seed and hemp protein meal round out the dry ingredients with a few eggs and some water for liquid. The bountiful delicious Madrone berries made this batch go wild, on the second day, the normally red color from the beets when totally purple!

They turned out so sour I wasn’t sure my fresh from the farmer’s market apple-strawberry-raspberry sauce would be a sweet enough pairing. But a tad of honey and stevia combined made it one of the most delicious of all my GF pancakes. Where there’s a will there’s The Way!

The Way: Magic Bullet Toothjuice

This is what Linda needed, a one shot concoction powerful enough to kill the tenacious S. mutans. I like to call this bacteria “mutants” as that’s very much their nature, a highly adaptive, illusive, hard to kill species. For example, in response to a manual toothbrush they can smooth themselves down against the tooth making it impossible to really get them out. Even with an electric it’s difficult, but the oscillation of the heads (they don’t spin continuously around) is fairly effective in prying them up off the teeth, especially when using something akin to coconut oil.

Something I’ve discovered recently involves the use of two products you would normally think would be food for the bacteria: honey and salt (Himalayan). However, when used in combo with coconut oil they act to highlight the bacteria, drawing them out to try to take the sugar and salt, at which point they are vulnerable to the slice of a blade for instance, or an electric toothbrush.

Yesterday however was a whole new revelation. I’ve gathered knowledge recently in many ways. Once on the way home had some plaque wedged in between a wisdom tooth and back molar that was killing me, and no remedies on board. I found a big stand of rosemary and got some tough stems to scrape in between the teeth, that did a lot of good, and I will use this same applicator on Linda. From a book Dental Herbalism I have picked up a host more herbal and spice remedies to make my “toothjuice.” Too many to list but the highlights being rosemary, neem, echinacae, slippery elm and turmeric, in a coconut oil base, with traces of honey and salt. Adding a few spices mentioned in the Healing Spices book, all in all, it’s a delicious mix, it’s perfectly edible, and the deadliest thing I’ve ever used against bacteria. It literally melts plaque–dissolving the bacteria. Not even flouride does that, it kills the bacteria but leaves them stuck in there, then the dentist pulls it out in chunks. I have a lot of theories on why this isn’t the right way to do it but I’ll just explore one here.

In societies where oil pulling is common, the dentist is rarely needed. Oil pulling cleans the teeth so thoroughly on a daily basis, the combination of that and an electric toothbrush is enough to defeat the bacteria. I add the blade simply because at times it’s much faster and also the most deadly weapon I’ve ever used at getting that bacteria out. I dearly love that blade, so much so she has a name, Charlize, or Charlie. The ability to sterilize the steel with flame–as well as the precision killing ability–are the reasons I trust that method over any other. Understand the blade is never actually cutting on the tooth, but rather separating the bacteria from the tooth, killing them. The design of the throwing blade is not to actually be sharp on the edges, and the point is well rounded, I keep her just sharp enough to engage the bacteria, but not enough to scrape enamel.

The blade work is paused for Linda right now, it was really in emergency that I went in to try–succeeding–halting two cavities on two of her back molars on the right side. They were stopped in their growing by a vigorous solution and some engagement with the blade.

OK so onto what’s going on with Linda. Well last night was the first time since the initial blade work I tried to do anything, really just searching for a solution. Once this concoction was made I got Linda to rinse with it. I noticed the back two cavities were looking better, stopped in their progress and regressing a bit. However a new one was starting to form between her front teeth. Amazingly, in just a single rinse, that cavity was vanquished, all that was left this morning was the buildup of plaque. I got her to rinse again and even got the toothbrush in to get rid of more plaque. I plan to do this every morning now, as the taste of the stuff is so delicious she’s not adverse to it at all.

In terms of the cavities she’s got my plan is to use the rinses to keep them at bay and the brush to edge them back. With this toothjuice there is visible regression every time. At the point where they get down far enough I will go in with the blade for the final removal. Bacteria know they can’t defeat steel, that can’t be said about nylon or plastic bristles, and as I mentioned, they can adapt to anything they can best. Without the oil pulling, or something to loosen the bacteria, no toothbrush is really enough. Once all the bacteria have been killed, any filling necessary will be done the way Humans have done it for millenniums: with bees wax.

Indeed many bee products are great for the teeth, so let’s hear it, and protect, for the bees! Get Monsanto’s poison off this planet! While I’m advocating solutions consider supporting this operation by buying some of this toothjuice which I do plan to start bottling, as it really is a better way, and yes, you use it as toothpaste, I’m working on getting it thicker into a paste.

The Way: Breads in pics

Breakfast! Has to be your favorite meal of the day — nothing less will do — for you need the most fuel first! For most of you a high carb breakfast is fine, so I’ll refer back to my Steel Cut Oats post for the makings. Here’s the breads in a finished form, if you’re not worried about carbs — which I wasn’t until it came to my attention — you start with the oats and then pack them with a grain like corn meal which makes a really nice finish:

 

Now we’re onto low carb breakfasts all the time, using a lot more eggs, a lot less grains and potatoes, this is the ultimate method because I’ve figured out how to use primarily vegetables to sub for the grain ingredients and decrease the carbs by nearly whole measure. This also great because there’s no danger in pan frying them crispy! In the breakfast breads go beets, beet greens, kohlrabi, zucchini, carrots, chard or kale sometimes. Fruit is great, I use orange and carrot pulp, otherwise an apple cut up, and a few flame raisins are a must. These have the addition of prunes. If you are one of the lucky ones to have nuts, as we were given 50lbs of almonds, nut flour is incredible in these breads:

 

Onto the dinner hour. Cabbage veggie breads are the latest fad for me. Kohlrabi is good, beet greens, kale, chard basically any veggie that can be shredded or minced including leaves like spinach that can be added as well as onions which get added after. All the healing spices with the addition of fresh turmeric now:

 

And here they are baked:

 

In between times there’s one great frittata after another! Anytime meal, du jour! This one features the salmon I recently posted and some local goat cheese. These range from lasting between one and three days depending on how much I beef them up with veggies. The prettiest ones get scarfed down quite quickly:

The Way: Salmon

I have finally figured out how to make lox! Only even better, with a whole fish. Smoked inside the woodstove. Brined thoroughly in sea and Himalyan salt, and the staple pomegranate vinegar. Now the woodstove smoking is amazing. I cooked a chicken in there and the meat was preserved in a soup in the fridge for over a month. More than that it’s clearly making more protein bio-available in this form. In two meals of about 2 cups of salmon total I am stuffed, no other method has given near that much protein. Those of you with good grills with a thick iron hood can do what I’m doing here. The salmon goes up on a V rack. I grilled the tail this morning in the stove, a quick brine and then grilled medium hot. Linda had a portion of egg and salmon minced kale frittata for breakfast and another for lunch. For dinner we had more minced kale sauttéd in the pomegranate vinegar with salmon of course. Ummhmmm good!

The Way: braised hot salad

Contrary to my experience all my life with raw salads I’m aware that there are people who won’t eat much of anything raw. Here where the greens are plentiful it’s most common to just see a big salad cold. Before I’ve detailed how Linda won’t each much fresh greens cold. Of late though I’ve been doing a little sardines with some tomatoes in the pan with my homemade mayo. Tonight a great addition became apple which Linda similarly is much more inclined to eat. I braised a little more shallots and arugula in with mine. Coconut oil added and topped with pomegranate vinegar, heated hot, tossed over a bowl of fresh greens. 

The Way: less carbs

If you take the title of this post as “the way less carbs… method” that’s the salient notion. After two days of an aggressively hyper-delusional state it was time to pull out all the stops to get Linda back to a happy norm. It really is incredible to even say that is the norm, as formerly that hyper-delusional unhappiness was a common part of daily life, I wrote about the “tough afternoons.” Fortunately that has been mitigated by majority. Similarly, the less that goes on the less I will tolerate of it, and thus seek more and more remedies, endlessly. Life is the proverbial bitch when she’s in that state.

That said there are times when all my remedies won’t work. There isn’t enough CBD oil at the price of the stuff ($60 for 15ml) to use it solely. So I’ve really focussed on cutting out carbs as this is one way that’s known to help with AD. Both my dinner and breakfast breads are down to very little carbs and mostly veggies. For instance the breakfast bread I made this morning uses zucchini, beet and greens, carrot, egg and coconut oil, thickened with a cup of cornmeal and xanthan gum, and it is delicious. One advantage of taking out the carbs is that I can get them crispy in the coconut oil pan baking on the woodstove.

Sum total the combination of methods worked fairly well. Noting that less carbs doesn’t mean no carbs, a banana and peanut butter – my childhood “candy bar” – is still on the table. Peanut butter is a relatively low carb food however.

To get into the science just a bit the salient point with carbs is that we can turn them into glucose and/or sugars to run the body basically. The brain needs more specific carbs to do this however, ketones, as they are known. Alternatively the brain can extract ketones from fats when carbs aren’t available. Enter coconut oil – with it’s ketone properties – a medium chain triglyceride that can substitute for the glucose the brain would otherwise use. For the healthy body’s use of carbs here’s a good explanation.

So with AD we know the brain loses the ability to use that glucose, thus the alternative method of converting fats into ketones is the only way to survive. In the last few days I’ve seen just why carbs can be so harmful if they are abundantly unprocessed in the body. Basically the brain’s inability to extract the glucose seems to send the body on an endless quest to do so, ultimately causing the body to attack it’s own tissues.

What I’ve seen with Linda is that when she has a very simple breakfast with almost no carbs, the ease at which she moves after is indicative of the lack of struggle within the body, and it’s that struggle that I know is primarily responsible for the delusions. Alternatively if there’s a lot of carbs in the meal she has more trouble in her movements, and in general, it leads to frustration, which leads to delusions.

Breakfast being close to midday this is the critical meal, as it is for everyone, but in Linda’s case it means a good dose of coconut oil, which there is in all my breads, and a low carb meal.

The Way: Proof

They say progress never comes without a great price, even writing this line a week ago has ushered more price, than the few serious injuries I had to heal to get to writing this. Another flu bug, ear infection, beaten, for both Linda and I, quite something to get through it over the course of 5 days. This time I had the addition of juniper berries to battle the flu, added to my veggie bread, post coming soon. Along with the staple pomegranate vinegar, star anise, thyme, asafoetida, garlic, onions. It is truly amazing how effective these spices can be. I drink the pomegranate vinegar daily with water and lemon, in a very small concentration, increased in times when there’s crud around. Also adding a star anise pod to that mix makes a very potent medicine. I would bet that a straight marinade of star anise and pomegranate vinegar is more powerful than any commercial flu remedy. Go further with a little thyme, juniper berries, garlic, onions, in the vinegar to make a great flu preventive, and a delicious salad dressing.

Now, onto the proof of symptom reversal. There’s one unanimous craving I’ve seen and read about with AD: sugar. It’s entirely logical that the missing ability to process glucose would make the body crave sugar, like the addict to the drug, it’s almost instinctual to know, to want that response from sugar. However, we also know that sugar does nothing but more damage as it just increases the addiction. I use the example of seeing my dad – fully debilitated – by the disease, when we brought him a birthday cake. Having never been one to like sugary foods, he devoured half of it just sitting there. If we had asked him what it was he wanted in that cake he wouldn’t have been able to even fathom the sugar.

Linda however has much more reticence of sugar, and we have a minuscule amount of sucrose sugar in our diet. If I give her something like a sweet date, or juice, she very much recognizes the sugar and will remark that it’s “very sweet.” That in itself is not remarkable, she’s not now and may never not be as bad as my dad was with his MTBI brain trauma, accelerated AD.

So the proof that her sugar craving is not absolute, in this case, is in the peanut butter. The price for peanut butter has limited my buying it for one thing, when I do it’s unsalted, only significant in that salt can be a craving as well obviously. So I did get the conventional TJ’s peanut butter again of late because it really does make a nice addition to things like yams, peanut butter and yam can be a meal. Now with this peanut butter in the fridge Linda was absolutely smitten with it. Extolling it with the highest praises, pulling it out herself to just eat it by the spoonful. Ironically PB is not bad at all in terms of carbs and sugars, the main problems with AD, obviously there’s reason to limit that intake somewhat for fats, so I do. The desire for this PB is so intense that she’s gone to the lengths of taking it out of the fridge and burying it elsewhere, where neither of us can find it (such is the case now but the PB was one a quite old one I found unopened). Before this jar I bought a tub of fresh grind mixed nut butter from Andy’s. Unlabeled on that tub was the presence of honey, in honey roasted peanuts. I noticed that extra sweetness right off, and as we went through the tub it became more obvious. To my taste it was delicious, I actually found it quite addicting, for the honey sweetness. I helped myself to it as I thought that Linda would find this mix so addicting as to crave it for the sugar.

What I found was quite the opposite, she liked the sweet mixed butter, but clearly not nearly as much as the unsweetened, unsalted. Clearly not as much as even I felt the craving. She wasn’t willing to pull it out of the fridge, didn’t covet it, didn’t laud it with nearly as many compliments. I was truly flabbergasted by this, tasting something addictively sweet to me, just about every example of such in cookies and candy that Linda has had, she’s been the same, but not this. She wants the raw protein rich peanut butter more. Noteworthy that although Linda does love these cookies, she won’t go so far as hunting them down and coveting them, so she doesn’t have the pure addiction.

Now the why, my theory on the coconut oil replacement, detailed previously on the blog, has been that if it supplants the glucose in the brain, then it should decrease the sugar, glucose craving, potentially in favor of the healthy protein want. Make no mistake that sugar craving is one of the worst facets of dealing with AD, it leads to mood instability, depression, lust, confusion, a lot of issues. The fact that Linda doesn’t have this craving for sugar over protein – now proven – is a huge piece of progress for us. It’s so palpable I would venture to say there was a time in the past where the sweeter nut butter mix would’ve been the preferred choice, now it’s not, because of the coconut oil.

One might even confer from this, that the craving for sugar, over protein, could be a major decline in the overall health and well being of the typical AD sufferer. If the person literally forgets about the need for protein in favor of the lust for sugar, it’s logical that could lead to major problems. Linda on the other hand eats very well, balanced meals, even getting a good amount of veggies in the bread, and that is where we leave off here, to be continued soon!

The Way: Superfood quick!

So I realize one thing that would be very useful to a lot of people is having a quick way to get turmeric and coconut oil in a tasty dish. For my purpose, tempeh has become this very dish.

Unlike tofu, tempeh is fermented and has a sticky exterior, perfect for coating with turmeric. You can slab it or break it up into bits. Then you want to flour the tempeh with turmeric. You can use a dish for this flouring over again so if you have a cover for it then you can just reuse the excess turmeric.

Now there’s really two ways I do it. Sometimes it’s starts with stir-frying veggies like chard and kale, onions, carrots, then the tempeh comes last, usually I break it up into little bits this way and it stir fries easily. You can also stir-fry quicker cook veggies in with the tempeh like dandelion greens, spinach, tomato.

Alternatively you can use it in slabs and stack things on top of it, chard, dandelions are very good. The slabs coat just as easily as the bits and you can get a fair amount of turmeric to stick to it.

Then it’s into the pan with coconut oil and plenty of it, basically you can go by adding enough oil to soak the tempeh – that will take a lot – and then a bit more oil to keep the pan greased. Even a quarter cup of turmeric will take close to a cup of coconut oil.

Last night I made just such a quick meal, without even any other vegetables. Just broken up bits of tempeh with turmeric and coconut oil, a little tomato added at the end, about 5 mins total cook time. A couple tortillas, little cheese, then the tempeh and finally some fresh lettuce and avocado.

With the slabs of tempeh you can really get them crispy and they’ll take a lot of heat, either way you can do this with the heat on high as it’s very tough to burn.

Something interesting aside I’ve found of late, chopping lettuce fine and stuffing it into the taco makes Linda enjoy eating it just fine, and I can get a fair bit into a taco this way.