Nicky and Judy’s Summer 2017 Health Food Store Peregrinations

One of the things we really love to do when we travel is visit as many food coops and great health food stores as we can. Some are old favorites we always return to in places we used to live or routes we regularly traveled, and others are new discoveries. We don’t even have to buy anything! Just wandering the aisles feels like we’ve come home. We know folks we encounter there are part of our tribe, so to speak. And there is so much bounty and beauty and so many healthy vibrations from the food and the people. It is also really amazing to us how abundant these stores are. They range from the mega Whole Foods to a proliferation of sweet independent stores in town after town after town throughout New England and are a find for us in the big cities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario.

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Taking our Nut Cheeze on the Road!

Cashew Cheeze

Macadamia Pepper Cheeze

wrapped up and ready to go!

We’re spending the month of August travelling (we left Tiny at home in Cape Breton!), visiting friends and Judy’s siblings as well as exploring new and deeply familiar places. Our adventures began in Canada and have taken us from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario. We then turned to the south, entering the Green Mountains and following some of the major rivers through Vermont and into Western Massachusetts, then heading towards the coast in Boston and Cape Cod. We are now back in some of our stomping grounds in coastal Maine (“the way life should be”), and by the end of the month we will have meandered our way back to our loved home and neighbors in Ross Ferry, NS.

We had a number of fairly eclectic goals for this trip

Ginger, Haskap, Chocolate Chip Muffins (Vegan & Gluten Free)

Ingredients

• ½ cup oil (I used Avocado oil, but coconut or canola would also work!)
• 1 cup (or a little less) agave or other liquid sweetener
• 1 ½ cups unsweetened apple sauce
• 1 ¼ tablespoon ground ginger
• 3 cups gluten free flour (see mix below)
• ¾ tsp xantham gum
• 1 ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp sea salt
• ¾ cup haskap berries
• ¼ cup chocolate chips (or in my case, some chopped up raw chocolate!)

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and flour a 12 hole muffin pan.

Mix together oil and agave. Add applesauce and ginger, and mix again.

In a separate large bowl, combine flour, xantham gum, baking soda, and sea salt.

Add wet ingredients to dry and combine well. Fold in haskap berries and chocolate chips.

Fill muffin containers to the rim with batter.

Bake  on middle oven rack for 40 minutes, or until golden brown. Rotate after 20 minutes.

Cool in muffin containers for 5 minutes before removing. Cool another 30 minutes on rack before eating!

*Gluten free flour mix:

• 4 cups brown rice flour
• 1 1/3 cups potato starch
• 2/3 cup tapioca flour

Recipe adapted from Gingerbread Muffins in The Allergen-Free baker’s Handbook, by Cybele Pascal.

Encountering the Self through Writing Spiritual Memoir

Judy is offering her Spiritual Autobiography course online! Yahoo!

Dates: September 10 — October 8, 2017

Description:

While most writing workshops tell us to write about what we know, it turns out that in spiritual memoir, or autobiography, we can find ourselves writing ourselves into unfamiliar territory, with the writing process itself becoming a path towards greater and more profound understanding. In our time together, we will work collectively and individually to begin to uncover what is sacred in our lives, following the thread of how and when it became so. Elizabeth Andrew’s words can encourage us along this path, in acknowledging that, “The effort of translating experience into story seems to satisfy a spiritual need” (Writing the Sacred Journey, p. 5).

In this supportive online environment we’ll engage in both writing and reading spiritual autobiography. By writing, sharing, and at times rewriting, our own short pieces we’ll learn to follow the words themselves to take us to our core. Reading and discussing published essays with the lens of spiritual memoir, will allow us to explore other ways of writing autobiography, demonstrating what might be effective and moving. Or not! Reading in this way can be a key to writing and to personal unfolding.

First and foremost, this four week-long workshop is about becoming courageous and taking those first steps into the mystery of the self – one that we simultaneously know well but also fear to encounter.

Staying Awake to Who I Am

Cool mint patties

The raw chocolate journey

Rolling truffles

Ganache tarts

It’s interesting how the cliché that life is not a destination but a journey resonates with deeper meaning for us from time to time. When one chooses to step off of a well-trodden path (and we have chosen to step off many!) there are turning points when the whole pattern we are ostensibly crafting seems to shift into a totally different focus. In a recent period of reflection we became aware of how making a living and making a life are very different goals, and we are totally into the latter and only hoping to accomplish the former.

I recently dipped my toes back into the world of raw chocolate in a public arena after quite a bit of down time since my decision not to become an online raw chocolate entrepreneur.

Loving Life in Tiny

We really enjoyed spending a few hours with Danielle & Mat last summer as they stopped on their way through the area. And it’s wonderful to see what they’ve put together here from our conversations! It’s our favorite version of our story yet and the video footage is lovely :).

Fermented Nut Cheeze Workshop!

Macadamia Pesto Cheeze

Do you love cheese but dairy doesn’t love you? Do you have friends with dairy allergies and don’t know how to accommodate them with delicious non-dairy alternatives? Are you wanting to try being vegan but just can’t seem to let go of cheese? For all these reasons and more, this Fermented Nut Cheeze workshop is for you!

You’ll be provided with recipes, tips, tricks, and plenty of yummy samples too!

Tiny Living Str—e—t—ch

The joys and challenges of crafting “pop up” fermented nut cheeze workshops in a tiny space were revealed over this last month as I discovered the questions of timing in the stages of cheeze making – fitting a 48 hour fermentation process into a two hour class. And I must admit, just between you and me (and Judy), that preparing was sometimes a bit stressful. Though I do so love the creativity of a course design process, for a number of reasons this was not an easy flow.

First off, I realized that it had been two years since I’d offered any raw food workshops, so the nutritional info that used to be on the tip of my tongue just wasn’t. And my brain seems to have aged in the meantime, so it was extra work to get back in the groove. Plus this was a new workshop for me. I had gotten excited about raw vegan cheezes for us, but it’s a whole different ballgame to be able to engagingly and educationally present the process to others coming from diverse interests and backgrounds.

Raw Food Workshop: Fermented Nut Cheeze

The Deep Table Series

https://deeptableblog.wordpress.com/

Macadamia Pesto Cheeze

 

Do you love cheese but dairy doesn’t love you? Do you have friends with dairy allergies and don’t know how to accommodate them with delicious non-dairy alternatives? Are you wanting to try being vegan but just can’t seem to let go of cheese? For all these reasons and more, this Fermented Nut Cheeze workshop is for you!

You’ll be provided with recipes, tips, tricks, and plenty of yummy samples too!

Boularderie Island Walkabout

Cape Breton Island

The route travelled around Boularderie Island

I live on an island (Boularderie) within an island (Cape Breton). That’s a pretty unusual thing in itself. In fact, I seem to have a history of finding myself living on islands throughout my life. I was born in Montreal, situated largely on the island of the same name at the confluence of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence Rivers. I’ve also lived on Campobello Island in New Brunswick just adjacent to Lubec, Maine. And I’ve spent a fair amount of time on Cape Cod – a spit of land separated from mainland Massachusetts by a canal.

A few weeks back I had an itch to do some longer walks so I decided, on a bit of a whim, to walk around the island I currently live on – Boularderie Island. I had heard that there are local folks who sometimes do this in the spring as a fundraiser, so it was not entirely an original idea! Judy and I made an initial drive to get a sense of the distance. The circumference of the island, as measured in our car, is about 90 km. I figured if I walked 10 km each morning I should make it in nine days. Turned out I walked a bit more each day so it only took eight. They didn’t happen all in a row as I chose not to walk if I woke up to pouring rain or had a morning appointment, so it took me about two weeks to find eight walking days. And what a lovely walkabout – there’s so much to see when moving at a human pace!