Admiring Ann @ PJLifestyle

Check out my latest, Admiring Ann: 5 Coulterisms for Counterculture Conservatives over at PJLifestyle, part of PJMedia.

Great stuff, if I do say so myself ...all thanks to Ann.

Quick & Easy Vegan Cooking

No one has time to cook, including me.  The good news is, living a whole foods, plant-based lifestyle doesn't require hours in the kitchen.  In fact, veggies often require less prep work and less cook time than meat-based dishes.

Along with being completely impatient in the kitchen, I like to experiment.  My Great-Grandmother was the master -- feeding kids in the Depression was a trial-by-fire way of learning how to cook on your feet with whatever was available.  Following her lead, I've done a little reading and a lot of experimenting with plant-based vegan recipes.  Here's what I've learned so far:

Try Everything

Think you don't like fennel?  Afraid of rutabagas?  As my Dad always said, "Try it.  You may like it!"  Never say no to an opportunity to try a new food item or dish.  You don't know what you're missing and, barring a food allergy, none of it will kill you.

Experiment with Balanced Pairing

Veggies, grains, beans, all of it is meant to be eaten together.  Pairing foods pairs nutrients, enhancing your body's ability to digest and process what you're eating.  The key is not to overload your plate with too many of one grouping - you don't want all beans and no veggies.  Spread the love and throw a little bit of everything in the mix.

Use Olive Oil

Can the sprays, skip the canola, and eat your vegetables whole.  Extra Virgin Olive Oil is a great source of healthy fats and one of the best ways to sautee or roast your meal. 

Rinse Your Canned Beans

Canned beans make life easy.  They're also higher in sodium than dried beans.  Rinsing your beans before using removes 25-33% of the sodium, so for me, it's out of the can and into the strainer for a bath before they hit the pan.

I'm sure I'll think of more lessons as I go along, but for right now, let me leave you with this recipe from the kitchen sink:

Chunked butternut squash
Chunked rutabagas
Fresh spinach
Fennel
Roman Beans (I used canned)
Garlic
Allspice
Olive Oil

Toss squash and rutabagas in olive oil and allspice.  Put in the oven at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until golden.

While the veggies roast, coat the bottom of your frying pan with olive oil and throw in the fennel.  (If you're using fresh garlic, throw that in now, too.)  Treat it like an onion - put the lid on, keep the flame around medium, and leave it for 3-5 min or until golden. 

Then, throw in the spinach.  (Using garlic powder?  Now's the time!)  Mix it all up, put the flame on low, lid the pan for 3-5 until the spinach steams down a bit. 

Last, but not least, throw in your beans and give everything a good toss.  Let them heat for another 3-5 with the lid (keep the nutrients in the pan).

Grab a huge bowl, pour in your spinach mix, then pull out the squash and rutabagas.  Throw those in, toss it around, and you've got a healthy, filling, and quite tasty meal.

10 minutes prep (I picked up organic pre-cut squash to save some time)
20 minutes cook
30 minutes until you eat!

Stays good in the fridge for 1-2 days.

Enjoy!

Verging on a Plant-Based Lifestyle

I've been going through a lot of ch-ch-changes over the past 7 or 8 months.  After smacking into some really bad lab results at my annual doctor's visit, I decided that I needed to start focusing on myself if I wanted to stick around and write for another 80 or 90 years.

Project Get Healthy began with me finally embracing my slagging gym membership.  I lost about 15 lbs just by working out religiously at the gym 2 – 4 times a week and watching my diet.  Watching my diet meant cutting out desserts and junk food and watching portion sizes.  I still ate all the food I normally did - chicken, fish, beef, Rice a Roni, Pasta and Rice Sides, all that good packaged stuff, and veggies/fruits.  Think: Your average American diet.

Then I had my second kidney stone attack in a decade.  I grew up knowing I'd be a chronic stone former, but I didn't have my first attack until college when horrible eating habits ebbed into exercise and high levels of stress flowed in daily lifestyle.  Oddly enough, this most recent attack came at a similar time.  I had just started correcting my health habits, lost weight, worked three jobs and kept a house and husband happy ...and a 8 millimeter stone decided to come on down.

Thanks to my awesome nephrologist, this caused a major diet change that is a prime contributor to my weight loss now, especially since I haven’t been able to work out as much lately.  (I hit the gym for the first time in 3 months yesterday.)  Not only have I maintained my weight loss, I've lost an additional 5 lbs. just by eating right.

Basically, I’m adapting into a Plant-Based, Nutrivore style of eating.  Note: style, not ‘diet’. 

How, my co-worker asked?  Here is my response:

The first thing you MUST do is STOP eating based on calorie counts.  You can eat a ton of crap a day and still maintain a calorie count – but those calories will be empty of nutrition. 

Start eating based on nutrient values.  Instead of looking at calories, look at carbs, good fats, fiber, vitamins and minerals in what you eat.

You’ll find that processed foods have had the nutrient values sucked out of them.  Refined flour and sugar are the worst.  High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) forget it. And avoid trans fats.  Jamie Oliver advises to stick to the perimeter of the food store where the fresh stuff is and avoid the center aisles as much as possible.

When cooking - Oils – use olive oil as much as possible.  Look for the fresh stuff – no trans fats.  Avoid vegetable oils.  Use a variety of spices – they have great health benefits and are better than salt.

This leads you down a road focused on fruits, veggies, seeds, nuts, grains as your primary diet.  There are arguments over raw versus cooked – each method has its worth.  The thing to remember about cooking veggies is that steaming them is the best and avoid using the microwave as much as possible.

Cutting out meat/animal products is a requirement for me, but isn’t necessarily for you.  Now, given what many studies have shown – that eating animal-based diets is harder on your digestive system and a main contributor to heart disease and cancer, you may start to rethink exactly how much meat/meat product you consume. 

And, ultimately, if you’re aiming for optimal nutritional value, you’re going to lean towards organic foods to avoid the chemicals associated with non-organic farming.  Yeah.  Big bucks – or at least it can be.  Trader Joe’s is pretty on par with Shop Rite prices and seasonal farmers markets help keep costs down.  I’m not organic.  My husband would kill me if he saw those shopping bills.  But I do seek to be aware of what is going into my food.

Now – digestive issues.  I know what you’re thinking: All these veggies are going to give me heartburn.  Trust me; I was heartburn queen before I started this diet.  Since then, not one case of heartburn.  To aid in any digestive concerns, try drinking a warm cup ofwater with a slice of lemon or lemon juice in the morning.  Lemon juice is a GREAT digestive aid.  So are ginger and chamomile – I like mixing the Rooibos Zingiber Ginger and Peach Tranquility teas from Teavana for a nice, comforting brew.  Remember: acid reducers, Tums, etc. are helpful – but ultimately  they’re killing the good acid and good bacteria in your digestive tract, which is only going to cause you more problems down the line.

Speaking of tea – go herbal.  Need a caffeine boost?  Try Yerba Mate dried (NOT smoked – too many carcinogens) it’s a heavier green tea that you can mix with any flavor and has as much caffeine per cup as a cup of coffee.  Black tea has a load of oxalates that can build into kidney stones, so it’s advisable to stick to Yerba, or Green Tea (10% of the caffeine of coffee) or herbal (no caffeine).  Herbal teas have the most health properties.

And take a multivitamin!

Some good resources:

http://caltonnutrition.com/nutrivore.aspx - Read their book “Naked Calories” for great facts on nutrients in food

www.theplanteater.com  references a number of great studies being done on a plant-based diet. 

Remember, the plant-based idea is a Biblical one.  Know the story of Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach and Abedigo?  They ate fruits/veggies/grains instead of the Babylonian King’s rich meats and wine.  In one week, they were healthier than the king’s men and Daniel won the favor of the King.  Yep.  Not to mention, Biblically speaking, the human race didn’t start eating meat until after Noah’s Ark landed on dry ground.  At the same time God permitted man to eat meat, He also cut our lifespan to a max of 120 years.  (Hence all those truly ancient folks living until 800 or 900 Biblical years…yeah…we don’t do that anymore.)

Whole Living Magazine (picked mine up at Barnes and Noble) has a LOAD of great easy recipes.  They’ve got a 21-day menu in the latest edition that helps you cleanse and break into a plant-based lifestyle.

Hope this helps!  Remember, it’s a lifestyle change.  Start slowly.  Incorporate things gradually.  You’ll find yourself having more energy and just feeling better in general – better health, better mood.  Your skin tone will also improve and your hair will shine.  And you’ll sleep better, too.

Merry Christmas from the Jews

Merry Christmas, dear Reader.

You don't have to reciprocate, of course, but you could say Thanks.

Like, "Thanks for the Jewish guy we're celebrating."

Or, "Thanks for sharing with us the idea of a redeeming Messiah in the first place."

But if you're a more secularized gentile, "Thanks for White Christmas and the greatest hits of Irving Berlin," will also do.

If you work in an industry that would normally require your presence today or tomorrow, you could say "Thanks" for the Jewish guy or girl willing to pick up your shift, too.

This holiday season tends to bring out both the best and the worst in humanity.  We turn yuletide spirit into a competition to see whose lawn can be the brightest, whose gifts can be the fanciest, and whose wishes can be the most Christmas-y, i.e. the "It's Christmas, goddamnit, not Happy Holidays!" meme, as if for everyone, Christmas is the theme.

For us Jews, it's a holiday -- that's true. 

But for most of us, the holiday is about you.

So while you're spreading Yuletide Cheer, telling all that Christmas is here, take a moment to thank a Jew.

2,000 years later, we're still making Christmas wishes come true.

JFNA GA 2012

Check out the November issue of the Jewish Journal of Ocean County to read my take on the Jewish Federations of North America's General Assembly held November 11-13 in Baltimore, MD.

My Observations on the 2012 Election

1. We're four years away from a European-style social democracy. (Can't take credit for this one - just agree with it.)

2. The economy is already sounding the death knells, shuddering and sputtering its way to an inevitable crash.  Thanks to Quantitative Easing (because who remembers Weimar?) it'll be given a better shot in the arm than anyone needing any kind of life support once Obamacare comes into full force.  And, like those seeking medical care in 2014 and beyond, that shot in the arm is going to be more euthanizing than envigorating.  Get those wheelbarrows ready, folks; we'll have some bread to buy!

3. Count on your tax dollars (backyard sheds full of them) going towards making sure your kids stay in college longer - because it isn't like there'll be jobs for them when they graduate.  Then again, what am I saying?  Thanks to a fully federally funded educational system from teet to thirty, this generation is going to be fully qualified to obtain the career of their dreams: Mid-Level Bureaucrat. 

4. Have a disease?  Joints wearing out?  Getting older?  Don't have the energy to hold a full time job?  There's a new treatment that goes something like this: Stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

5. Think Obama already did enough middle east butt-kissing the first time around?  This term will usher in a newer, deeper level of political appeasement, known as "negotiating with the mentally insane". 

6. That MTA "See Something, Say Something" campaign is going to take on a whole new meaning when Iranians are granted visas and direct flights to the US.  The sad fact is, thanks to our increasingly socialized government, we are poised for an influx of radical Islamists - akin to what occurred in the EU in the mid 90s.  And we all know how well that's turned out. 

7. Start apologizing to the American military now.  They've lost their minds, their limbs, and their lives to protect your right to empower a man who is willing and happy to leave them to slaughter.  Parker and Stone may have joked about Operation Human Shield, but it is Obama who has made it a reality.

8. Our nation is composed of approximately 60,085,524 selfish individuals, the majority of whom operate under the assumption that because they made the needs of a so-called "interest group" their priority when voting, they are the Mother Theresas of their generation.  What they don't understand is that by voting for the needs of a demographic instead of the needs of a a country, they put the self-interests of a few ahead of the interests of the many...thereby putting themselves on the same level as all those self-serving politicians they claim to hate.  But if you call them selfish, you're racist/sexist/homphobic and/or declaring a "war" on them.

9. Orwellian will now be re-termed "Obamanian" because two government programs are good, but four are better.

10. Conversion to Judaism may just beat out backyard bomb shelters in the category of "methods of survival".  Currently, Israel stands as the only nation with leadership that understands that you can not negotiate with someone who holds as sacred the belief that you are better off dead-and they have the nukes to prove it.

Let Them Eat Obama, and other musings on Yuppie Liberals

Do you ever get the feeling that contemporary political discourse has been hijacked by a bunch of flakey ideological yuppies?

If Seth Rogen's latest tweet wasn't enough to convince you that Gen-Y granola crunchers (who only pick up their grains at the like of Whole Foods or the organic market in a smog-ridden metropolis on either coast) think they have a handle on key domestic and foreign policy issues of our time (Gee, Mr. Million-Dollar-Pothead-Actor Seth, perhaps you don't care that your tax dollars that bailed out GM were used to create jobs ...in China) check out the fluff over at CNN.com begging Young Voters, Don't Give Up on Obama.

Written by Jack Schlossberg, JFK's grandson (cha-ching!), a sophomore at Yale University (cha-ching!), the thinly-veiled plea for Obama 2012 begins with a Catcher in the Rye reference.  (I guess this kid is too young to remember the disastrous results last time Holden Caulfield was held up as a cultural icon - and, no, I'm not talking about that South Park episode where the Colorado foursome couldn't get over the fact that they "read a book for nothing".)  If the evocation of Salinger isn't daftly immature enough, try these gems on for size:

I was too young to vote in that election, but after volunteering for the Obama campaign, I felt what many first-time voters and volunteers felt after the last election: proud, accomplished and significant.

So, this is your first election and you're already telling us how to vote because you felt good after manning a phone bank? Thanks for that mega-experienced viewpoint.  Tell me, did getting hung up on feel as good as feeding the homeless on Christmas Eve?

Four years later, what was once to us the novel and exciting adult world of politics now seems bitter and partisan. 

Did you miss all those "Bush = Hitler" signs hanging around the campaign offices and rallies the last time around?  You're only now catching on to the cynicism?

Just because our politics and government can disappoint us sometimes doesn't mean we should forget how far we've come.

In all that time, you've graduated high school and started college!  Like most college students today, you're still living off of your parents' money.  Unlike most college students, you're doing it at an Ivy League university (instead of some random state school whose name will be meaningless on a resume) and thanks to those family connections, you're already getting published by major news organizations, which means you might be one of those ten college graduates in your class who might get a job when they graduate.  Geez, I'd say you've accomplished more than Obama in the past four years - unless, of course, you count his improved golf score.

According to Schlossberg, Obama's top accomplishments are listed in the following order:

Adult children can now stay on their parents' health insurance until their 26.  

That is, unless Mommy and Daddy lose their jobs because, in this sinking economy, not many businesses want to incur the increased cost of health benefits that are rolling down the pike with the enactment of Obamacare.

Obama has increased funding for Pell Grants and promised to keep student loan interest rates low.

Because college degrees are proving so viable in today's economy that, by the time this kid graduates, he'll need a PhD just to get a job mopping floors.

Obama repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so now "anyone can join the military regardless of their sexual orientation."

Kind of funny coming from a kid who attends a university that just relented after 40 years, finally allowing the ROTC back on campus because, well, they had to; the President ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which was their only viable excuse in a post-9/11 world to not support the training and education of future military at their university.  (PS, Gays could join the military before the repeal of DADT; depending on their feelings about going public regarding their sexuality, they may have chosen not to.  There is a difference.)

"When Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act, Obama changed policy administratively, enabling immigrants who came to the country as children to avoid deportation."

"Changed policy administratively"...is that one of those fancy, Ivy League terms for "abusing power to push legislation"?  In this case, it meant pushing legislation so the children of illegal immigrants who did not pay taxes to support their child's public education or medical costs could remain in the country.  (What is it with socialists continually justifying the lack of willingness of certain groups to pay their "fair share"?)  You do the math.

Not to be outdone, Schlossberg reiterates the same leftist talking points about the "Republican war on women's health" (without any citation to actually define this so-called "war") and the "broken economy" inherited from George W. Bush (again, without any factual citation - because the theory has been grossly repudiated), adding the punctuation point that Obama has "preserved the possibility of home ownership and jobs for us."  Again...no factual citations here, either.  No remark on the fact that in four years the unemployment rate has yet to go below 8% (despite Obama's promises), that home ownership is stagnate at best, and that an entire generation of potential homebuyers are too busy being unemployed to go house hunting.

But if the pride in being a dependent on parent and government money, followed by the complete lack of factual evidence supporting any criticism of Republicans hasn't already convinced you, here's Schlossberg's thesis:  His generation should support the President because, "Obama has acted aggressively on the issue most important to my generation: climate change." 

Just to insert a bit of logic into the conversation, here are a few fun facts about our environment-loving President, thanks to the fine research of Randall Hoven over at American Thinker:

He killed the Keystone pipeline. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce put that at "more than 250,000 permanent jobs in the long run" that were killed.

He put a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf (19,000 jobs), restricted Gulf drilling overall, and outright banned drilling in the eastern Gulf for 7 years (230,000 jobs).

And of course, no drilling in ANWR or offshore on the east or west coasts. But Obama is not against offshore drilling everywhere; he provided $2B in loans to Brazil to drill offshore there.

The Government Accountability Office estimates that new EPA regulations will result in two to twelve percent of coal plants being closed.

Obama is not against all energy companies -- just those that actually produce energy. You might have heard of Solyndra, a solar-panel company that received over $500 million in government funding, then went bankrupt. Other government-funded "green" companies that went bankrupt: Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, Mountain Plaza, and Olsen's Mills. Obama has the reverse-Midas touch when it comes to green energy. (Or maybe it has to do with his "green jobs czar" being a self-described communist.)

If your child was having an asthma attack and you found yourself without an inhaler (they're not called breathalyzers), you could have made a quick trip to the local drug store and got one over-the-counter. Not anymore. Now you will need a prescription, and it might not work as well.

And of course, "pro-choice" Democrats are not so pro-choice when it comes to light bulbs.

Business regulations too numerous to mention: the EPA's climate change regulations, OSHA's "occupational noise" regulation, the EPA's new ozone regulations, Dodd-Frank, the EPA's training requirements for renovation projects, etc.

So, let's get this straight:  The grandson of a former President who is in the midst of obtaining an Ivy League education (aka Jack Schlossberg) believes that you should support the man who has single-handedly done more to destroy the economy of the United States through "environmentally based" legislation because "our generation cares about healing the earth."

If the ideological love-fest hasn't smacked you in the face quite yet, Schlossberg ends his plea for Obama with remarks about ending racism.  Yes, we have gone from giving amnesty to illegals and hugging the whales to a full-on United Colors of Benetton commercial.  Comparing the election of Obama as the first black president in '08 to his own grandfather's election as the first Catholic president in 1960 is his defense of the need to "fight for change" that doesn't happen overnight.  Change takes time.  That's why you should give Obama another four years. 

Here's where the nuts in the granola truly begin to kick in.  This yuppie has no problem with Obama's March that has burned a path of economic destruction across the country, because for this rich white kid (wait - I thought that was a Republican stereotype?)  the "fight for change" is an ideological one that involves ending racism and fostering unity across the country and the world, a battle gloriously led by Benevolent Barack.  Politics for this kid is not about real-world pragmatism that focuses on keeping jobs in the market so workers can put food on their tables, simply because this kid never had to worry about starving a day in his life.  He's far too busy with other, more important concerns, like fluffy rabbits and melting ice caps.  Schlossberg is too busy praising the creation of electric cars to realize that, the way the economy is going, most Americans won't ever be able to afford one.

When Seth Rogen tweeted that Romney's "Keeping America American" was a popular slogan among the KKK in the 1920s, he was aiming for political punch in 140 characters or less.  The fact that the KKK notoriously supported eugenecist and Mother of Modern Birth Control Margaret Sanger in the 1920s is as easily lost on the liberal Rogen as is the fact that the precious "fight for change" that was the Civil War in Schlossberg's eyes was a bloody war fostered by his own slave-owning political party of choice.  (And while we're talking forgetting history, let's also talk about the irony in a Jewish American actor and a Kennedy being on the same political side - especially given the fact that good ol' Grandpa Joe Kennedy was once farmed out by the Democrat FDR administration to warn Hollywood Jews to stop picking on Hitler, lest they be blamed for getting America into the war.)  What mattered was the style of the comment, not the substance - the quick and dirty irony in the ownership of the slogan - to crunch at the ideological battle that rages in the liberal yuppie mindset. 

What folks like Rogen and Schlossberg don't get is that "Keeping America American" to a Romney jobs-first campaign can be just as easily interpreted as, "We want to keep American corporate jobs in America.  We want those American-created jobs to go to Americans, who worked hard to escape terrible circumstances in their former countries and want to do it right, right here."  They don't get it because they can't fathom that someone would dare possess a different perspective than their own.  And they certainly won't hear of it; the granola crunching is just too loud. 

Besides, people like Rogen and Schlossberg have bigger First World battles to fight (like crowning political messiahs) than to actually read a little, or give a damn.  After all, they've got the dimes to spare.  Those of us who actually know our history will recall that it was the insanely rich upper class who felt smart and snippy enough to tell the unemployed masses, "Let them eat cake." 

Funny; Marie Antoinette could've easily tweeted that one on the way to the guillotine.