Once a year...

Once a year, or maybe twice, everyone should have nothing but fresh homemade strawberry shortcake for supper. When the local road-side fruit markets are selling fresh strawberries, just picked this morning, buy a whole flat of them. Pay extra for the ones that were picked today, or better yet, take a child or grand-child along with you to pick your own.

Make biscuits from scratch; it takes 10 minutes to stir it together and 10 minutes to bake. This is less time than it will take to go into the grocery store to buy biscuits or pound cake, cheaper, you have all of the ingredients in your house already (if you’re not a bachelor), and there are no artificial ingredients or preservatives. I’ll post my mother-in-law’s recipe on my “Recipe Page” in a few days. Cut the biscuits in half, spoon in the fresh mashed up strawberries, put the top of the biscuit on top, then more strawberries, and Whipped Cream is optional (also on Recipe Page).

Make extra biscuits so that you can have more for breakfast.

Once a year, or twice a year, in August when the local corn is ripe and picked daily, and you can almost smell it from your car when you pull into the roadside market, have nothing but Sweet Corn for dinner. Eat it until you groan with contentment.

Once a year, or twice if you like, have nothing but fresh blueberry pancakes (or shortcake) for breakfast. Put mashed blueberries on top of the pancakes that you have already put blueberries into. Put them in yoghurt.

You get the idea. You don’t have to have a square meal every day. When food is fresh, just hour old, gorge on it. I like to think of it as excess in moderation. And as long as it is fresh it is guilt free.

Mid June Ramblings: Soft Drinks!

One of the simplest things that we “Average Americans” can do to become healthier is stop drinking soda pop. Stop drinking regular soda pop, diet, sweetened iced teas, sweetened and flavored waters, and anything else in this category.

I did it in 2003 and I have to admit that it was almost as hard to do as quitting smoking cigars (I never had a cigarette, but I used to smoke the occasional Black and Mild pipe tobacco cigar). I had been drinking diet pop (as we mid-westerners say it) since the late 1980’s when I found out I was hypoglycemic, and quit eating and drinking sugar, which was MUCH harder to do than quitting cigars.

Soft drinks, regular or diet, are bad for you. Regular pop has an average of over 3 Tablespoons of sugar in each can. Would you sit at your kitchen table and eat 3 Tablespoons (not teaspoons!) of raw sugar? Come on now! And Diet pop is nothing but artificial colors and flavors and sweeteners. No nutritional value, and it makes your liver and kidneys work way too hard to separate the chemicals from the water.

Don’t drink it with meals. If you’re drinking pop along with a meal, as is forced upon us in every restaurant in the country, food combining teaches us that we shouldn’t drink any liquids with our meals anyway; it is too difficult for our stomach and small intestines to work on solids and liquids at the same time.

If you’re drinking it for the caffeine and sugar boost, stop it. You are grossly mistaken about how this works. All “uppers”, like caffeine, sugar, amphetamines, and others, have a short-term action of increasing the metabolic rates of the body. When this action/effect wears off, the body has an equal and opposite re-action that suppresses our metabolic rates. Caffeine and sugar actually make us more tired than we felt before we consumed them.

Alternately, when we take suppressants, after they wear off we feel more energetic. This is why giving barbiturates to ADHD children makes them worse. It may work for a short time, but after it wears off they have re-acted" to a more agitated state than before. Also, these children almost always have sleep disorders and extremely poor eating habits. I’m sure that we will go into more detail later.

But back to today’s sermon: Stop allowing “pop” culture and advertisements to brain wash you into choking down soft drinks. I promise that once you’ve stopped drinking this garbage, not only will you feel better, but you’ll be amazed at how much heavier your wallet will be for not spending $2 for a bottle of chemicals that cost the bottler less to fill than it did to print the can.

Amen.