This week the basket included 8 ears of fresh sweet corn. Also an assortment of peppers, baby bok choy, mesclun, tomatoes, green beans, sweet onions, new potatoes, crookneck squash, an eggplant and a sourdough boule. Earlier this week I made a batch of ratatouille with eggplant and zucchini from my garden. I have tons of green tomatoes on my plants, and even two baby white eggplant!.
I have all this wonderful food and I am running out of ideas to cook it! Actually, I have lots of ideas but I don't always have the energy when I get home.
I noticed something interesting today when picking up the vegetables. The distribution is done at the Unitarian church down the street from the local hospital. Across the street is a Carmelite Monastery. I will admit, my curiousity was piqued. What is the etiquette for visiting a monastery like this? Does one call ahead? Just show up? The nuns and monks I have known in the past were not cloistered. KTC - any suggestions?
Home and Garden: August 2003 Archives
Over at Two Sleepy Mommies is a great rant on a recent WaPo article about the fattening of America. I started to put this in the comments box but enetation was doing its thing again, so here it is.
There is a BIG contributory to female obesity (sorry guys, I don't take care of men over the age of 2 months!) that is not getting any press at all, because it would be politically incorrect. That contibuting factor is hormonally based contraceptive medications, especially the depo-Provera shot. I have seen teenagers on depo gain as much as 40 pounds in a year despite getting exercise. But even low-dose birth control pills are usually good for 5 pounds a year wt gain.
Cattlemen used to give their stock estrogen to make them fatten up. That practice was eventually stopped, but people in the First World (not just America has an obesity epidemic, BTW) are doing it to themselves. There are measurable levels of synthetic female hormones in our drinking water from all the hormones excreted by BCP users. That is also not a politically correct thing to point out. I have this perennial discussion with all our Ob residents (part of my job is teaching them normal pregnancy and uncomplicated birth). They talk about the 'health advantages' of birth control pills (decreased menstrual bleeding, less anemia, decreased risk of ovarian cancer) and I point out that those same benefits can be found through early childbearing and ecological breastfeeding, followed by naturally spaced pregnancies. And women would not be experimenting on themselves with powerful synthetic versions of natural hormones.
On a personal level, I could stand to lose 100 pounds, but I was a skinny child and didn't get fat until I hit 40. Now I joke that all the weight I lost after each baby has finally found me again. I have decided that I am not going to try to lose weight, I am just going to eat well without obsessing about it, and I will get the exercise I enjoy when I can, and I will just try to be as healthy a fat lady as I can be. My cholesterol and triglycerides are low, my blood pressure is low, and I don't see the point of obsessing on these things. I would love to be skinny again, but my husband thinks I am beautiful and is just worried about my health with the weight. Well, so am I but I can only do so much. I have heard about a Catholic program that tries to help one get into a proper relationship with food and eating. If anyone here has any experience with it, I would love to hear about it. I can't remember the name right now, but the founder was on EWTN's Life on the Rock last week.
