Tangy Avocado Dill Dip

Because I had a molar gouged out, according to the dentist it's very important that a person takes amoxicillin to combat the bacteria in teeth from relocating to the heart ... and killing the patient. I wasn't going to take the amoxicillin because it's an antibiotic and therefore a feeder of candida, but when I asked a friend who's very much into holistic health about it, she told me the same. I decided it might not be a bad idea to take the amoxicillin ... but I'm going to combat the chemical and bacteria toxins with LOTS and LOTS of enzymes. So even before I had the molar pulled, I started soaking lentil, mung bean, and a tiny black bean to make enzyme-rich sprouts for feeding my body, especially while it's undergoing so much medical stress.

 

 

And since sprouts need a little something to make eating large amounts of them very palatable, I whipped up a creamy tangy dressing, which turned out VERY YUM!

Tangy Avocado Dill Dip/Dressing

 

1 avocado

1 whole lemon*

1/2 - 1 cup water

1 thick wedge onion

1 stalk celery

2-4 garlic cloves

1/2 rounded teaspoon Himalayan salt

1+ tablespoon dill (fresh is best)

* If the lemon isn't organic, the peel should be removed in order to eliminate pesticide residue that gets trapped in the thick and rough-surfaced skin.

Put all the ingredients in the blender except the dill, adding the desired amount of water to make either a creamy dip or a smooth pourable dressing. Whizz the ingredients to a creamy blend. When blended smooth, add the dill and buzz once to mix but not pulverize the attractively dill-flecked dip. Serve.

Molar Extraction and Pain-killer Soups

Today, finally after 3 1/2 years of living with a cracked and repaired molar, I got it pulled! Yes! Systemic candida is also perpetuated by bacteria that gets into the gums, especially in infected teeth, and though the infected tooth may be "cleaned out" and capped, the bacteria still resides deep in the gums and still feesd the blood flow with the infected bacteria.

 

I have been rather worried about my cracked tooth for a long time. It cracked at the height of all my health problems over 3 years ago, and my teeth for the first time in my life were nasty. Loads of bacteria, bad breath, plaque, and inflammation in the throat. [The scaling given by the hygienist turned my bad mouth and health situation around and I actually started getting batter.]

 

Once the hygienist finished the scaling, the dentist came over the see the damage of the cracked molar. Yikes! He injected me with whatever they use to anesthetize the tooth, I had a throat-tightening reaction. Very scary! I told the dentist he better quickly treat me before the stuff wore off because my body couldn't take any more injections that would affect the throat. I made him work without taking a break because I was so nervous. I'm sure that's why he told me my tooth didn't need to be capped. He insisted it was a good decision not to cap that tooth. I think he was unnerved about my reaction (and of course I was too) and that he didn't want to risk it. I didn't want to risk it either so told myself that when/if it cracked again, I was going to get that thing pulled.

 

Two years later, last fall, it was cracked again and the dentist absolutely insisted that the tooth was still good and could be repaired. What? So I have to go in every two stupid years to get the thing repaired?! But he wouldn't pull it. So I told him matter-of-factly that next time it was coming out. He accepted that probably thinking next time was way down the road. Well, "way down the road" turned into about four months.

 

As of the end of February this year, my job is finished and I have been planning to leave Korea - all rather sudden because back in November when we were to submit our letters for extending our contracts, I was feeling really bad again so submitted my letter of resignation. I was having water reactions again. I quickly figured out a deficiency of vitamin E was involved but it took over a month to figure out that I was also consuming inadequate amounts of magnesium. What clued me in to that was the water reactions themselves. If a person is having water reactions to most waters and even distilled water, then there has to be a problem with the person's electrolytes. Ah ha! And if it is an electrolyte problem, then there's a problem with the sodium-potassium pair or the calcium/magnesium pair. I thought about it a bit and decided it was most likely a problem of low magnesium, a typically under-consumed electrolyte. So I started feeding myself magnesium-rich foods and ... the reactions that the vitamin E didn't clear up, disappeared! Wow!

 

Anyway, because I had handed in my resignation and someone has taken my position, I am now jobless and therefore insurance-less come March 1. So I decided, "OK, let's get that evil molar out before the insurance expires." So today was the day.

 

That molar was indeed evil. It had some incredibly deep and tenacious roots. I saw that dentist easily pull a man's molar about a year ago, but there was nothing easy about pulling mine. He twisted back and forth and I could feel a big strain on my right jaw joint (the left was heavily anesthetized ... but I feel it now!). Finally, it just wasn't budging so he got what looked like an ice-pick or walnut-pick and had to gouge it out a bit. Well, that baby finally came out ... and yep, there was a very visible crack that went way down the tooth, which would have been well below the gum-line. Yes! It's finally out!

 

Afterwards, I went walking for three hours in the sunshine to boost circulation so the dental toxins would more quickly be stirred to go out of my system. But on the way home, the drugs were starting to wear off and I could feel the pain coming. I started planning what to eat to "fix" that problem, and the food had to be soft. Yep, lots of vegies, especially vegies that are anti-inflammatory. So by the time I got home, I had it figured ... and I included a handful of  cherry tomatoes, the only inflammatory food in the soup, to round out the flavor:

 

Anti-inflammatory Soup

 

2 cups garbanzos (cooked) + 1-2 cups garbanzo bean broth

1 large onion sliced

2/3 zucchini, sliced

2-3 stalks celery sliced*

4-5 cloves garlic

1 large knob ginger

20 sesame leaves**

2-4 stems green onions, sliced**

1 handful cherry tomatoes*

4 tablespoons coconut oil

1 teaspoon cumin*

2 teaspoons turmeric*

1 teaspoon rosemary*

3/4 teaspoon Himalayan salt*

2-4 cups water

 

Throw all ingredients above that have no stars in the pot and turn on the heat. After the onion becomes translucent, add the ingredients with one star (*) and cook on a medium simmer for just a few minutes to soften them. Then add the ingredients with two stars (**); stir them in and cook only a minute or two. Turn off the heat, and serve. [All vegies should be cooked soft but not overcooked so as to kill all the enzymes or all their natural flavor.]

 

My tooth and very sore jaw weren't too happy with a hearty soup so I blended the soup and sipped it. And as soon as I had had a few sips, the pain started easing, and by the time I'd sipped up a big bowl, the pain had really diminished!



 

The blended version. My left jaw joint was hurting worse than my gouged gum, so opening my mouth just enough to
spoon the soup in was all I needed. The jaw actually started to loosen after I'd taken a few sips.

After the main course, I still wanted to make sure that I had a lot of enzymes in my body, and of course chlorophyll. Both of them are very good for removing, or at least, masking pain. So I washed a big basket of some kind of green leaf in the cabbage family, meaning these vegies have a lot of oxalates, so eating them every day or every other day could interfere with calcium absorption, but I hadn't eaten any oxalates for three or so days, so these vegies were chosen because they have a high water content. Also in the mix are a handful of spicy sesame seed leaves, one peeled cucumber, and half of a package of strawberries, which are acidic by the way. Usually because of my candida, I don't eat fruit, but lately I've been trying to add a few other nutrients in. The vitamin E and magnesium scare told me that my body is starved for better nutrition and I've micro-managed the inflammation maybe too carefully. I've got to try adding foods ... carefully ... and the strawberries are greatly out-proportioned by the green leafies so should be "safe" at this point.

After I juiced everything, I had close to 7 cups of juice. I drank about 3 cups immediately and the lingering gum pain just slipped away. My body was absolutely saturated in 90% green vegie juice, which is great as a natural pain killer ... and quite tasty with strawberries mixed in!!!

Sunflower Black-eyed-pea Hummus

The black-eyed-peas were cooked overnight in a slow cooker; otherwise, this recipe too would be raw. I'm experimenting with protein and fiber-rich foods like beans, but still want to maintain a very high percentage of raw in my diet. This is pretty good. One thing about black-eyed-peas is that they can be eaten straight out of the crock pot without any seasonings, including salt. There's just something satisfying about their flavor that seems complete. Adding a just a touch of cumin and turmeric does bring out their flavor a lot though.

Sunflower Seed and Black-eyed-pea Hummus

 

1 cup sunflower seeds, soaked and drained

1 cup cooked black-eyed-peas with 1/2+ cup bean broth

2-3 large garlic cloves

1-2 tablespoons olive oil (optional)

cumin

turmeric

sea salt

The hummus spread on the raw,dehydrated lentil cracker (this one shaped like a personal pizza).

My personal pizza - raw lentil cracker for the crust, hummus, cilantro pesto, fresh parsley and chopped tomatoes.

Broccoli Flax Wraps (raw)

It seems I was a bit overly ambitious about quantities when making my first flax bread/wraps, but the recipes I've read online tend to use small amounts, which puts the "cooks" forever in the kitchen and I just don't have time for that. So unlike other recipes of 1/3 or 1/2 cup of flaxseeds, I used a whole cup ... and kept adding water ... and kept adding water ... and kept adding water to make quite a lot of wraps. I'm not sure I like raw broccoli in bread wraps - it's faintly astringent - but with salad tucked inside, I didn't notice the astringency at all.

 

Broccoli Flax Wraps (raw)

 

1 cup flaxseeds soaked in one cup of water 

more water as necessary (3 or so cups)

1 1/2 cups broccoli in florets

3 large cloves of garlic

sea salt

 

Let the flaxseeds and water sit for 15 minutes; meanwhile, cut up the broccoli. Then blend the broccoli in batches in with the gelling flaxseeds. Keep adding water as necessary to keep the batter blending but not to make the mixture runny. Add salt to taste or a celery stick or two if salt isn't preferred.

 



Let the flaxseeds sit in water to expand and begin gelling - approximately 15 minutes
(waiting too long will create a glob)

Blend the florets gradually into the gelling flax blend.
Keep adding water or the blender motor will burn up.

Spread the batter onto dehydrator sheets - (I used parchment paper) - and dehydrate for 4 hours on 115F for 4 hours.
Flip them over and dehydrate another hour. 

After 4-5 hours of dehydrating, they will be soft and flexible and hold together very well.
Wrap them around salads, beans, whatever to make flax wraps ... and enjoy!

First Sugar-free Raw Pie!

Without using any sugar or sweeteners, I must rely on blending food flavors to lend that dessert "sweetness" people so much like. Well, my cranberry-topped zucchini "cheesecake" is pretty good, especially since I prefer savory over sweet, which this is a unique conbination of. 

 

Raw, completely sugar-free zucchini "cheesecake"
 

Crust:

1 cup washed walnuts

1/3 cup hemp seeds

4 tablespoons flaxseeds

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon cloves

1 teaspoon coriander

pinch of sea salt

water as needed

 

Filling:

1 large skinned zucchini

1/2 cup sunflower seeds, soaked & drained

1/2 cup liquid coconut oil

pinch of sea salt

 

Topping:

1/2 cup frozen cranberries, chopped

All of the ingredients in the list above are naturally sweet, except the walnuts, flaxseeds, sunflower seeds, and sea salt, oh, and the tart cranberries! I would have used the naturally sweet almond but didn't have any on hand, but this turned out pretty decent for no sugar or sweetener, and I'll certainly be making it again! Without the cranberries though, it just couldn't be called "dessert".

 

The flax nuttiness of the crust and the cranberries really made this a nice combination :)

"The Hundred-Year Lie" - A Book of Truth

Randall Fitzgerald compiled a powerhouse of information of what governments/individuals are doing to alter our food supply in some monetarily beneficial way to them but at the loss and suffering of the majority. Fitzgerald labeled his book The Hundred-Year Lie because the lie began in earnest in 1906, the year the US Congress enacted the Pure Foods and Drugs Act, the first law of its kind giving the public a false sense of security about the safety of its foods and medicines. He goes on to expose what "natural flavors" really mean, the harm in vaccines, the ludicrousness of supplements as being beneficial rather than the chemical harming substances they really are. He discusses in detail about how fluoride got dumped into our water supply, which resulted in the company getting paid by the government for preventing tooth decay in people rather than paying $8,000 a truckload to haul off and dump their toxic waste somewhere (p. 130-1).

Fitzgerald gave data from a variety of valuable sources that I want to follow up on for my own and further knowledge. Some books he cited that are valuable about teaching about man's inharmonious relationship to the environment are Marla Cone's 2005 book, The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic, Schlink's 100 Million Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics, and the ethnobotanist Plotkin's Medicine Quest. Other books he introduced relate to health, for example, Fitzgerald introduced the The Saccharine Disease by Cleave a British physician, Revolution at the Table by Levenstein who presented a history of food including the complex wizardry of food chemists, and Blaylock's Excitotoxins which exposes the dangers of MSG, aspartame and other chemical concoctions. 

However, the nine-hundred-page book, Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine (2005), which demonstrated a wise and in-depth knowledge of anatomy and physiology and complementary, holistic medical treatment caught my attention. The author deduces that the following revelations of an advanced society existed 4,000 years ago.

• "Ancient physicians were trained as specialists in dentistry, neurology, gynecology, pediatrics, and other areas of medicine, and they utilized the medicinal properties of more than three hundred Mesopotamian plants in their treatments.
• Careful observation and experimentation produced treatments that evolved over hundreds of years. Some of these ancient treatments are still in common use today within Western medicine, one being the practice of surgically draining fluid from between the lungs and chest of pneumonia patients by making an opening in the fourth rib and inserting a drainage tube.
• These ancient doctors were able to measure pulse rates and used metal hammers to tap below the knee to test reflexes, just as we do today.
• They cleaned surgical wounds using bandages treated with ginger and cedar, both antiseptics; they treated blindness with raw liver, which we now know corrects the vitamin A deficiencies that cause night blindness; they used marijuana to treat pain and nausea, just as we do for cancer patients today; they treated women with irregular monthly cycles using a medicine made from date pits, which we now know contains estrogen."

The ancients had great understanding of healing, and Fitzgerald showed that the Bible's New Testament in "The Gift of the Magi", and that the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh given to Joseph and Mary 2,000 years ago was in total the gift of life, and that these items were the most essential medicines of the ancient world! Myrrh is a tree resin and prized as an antibiotic, which was used by physician healers in Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome to clean and dress wounds. Frankincense, another resin, is both an anti-inflammatory and antifungal, and like myrrh, it is also a powerful pain-reliever.

At the end of his journey to discover and write about the chemicals used in our world so blindly today, Fitzgerald ended up at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida where he went through their full three-week detox program. Before going to HHI to detox, he had his blood drawn and sent off to Accu-Chem in Dallas for a reading of the chemicals in his body. The test cannot test the occurrence of all the drugs in the world as there are just too many, with thousands more added to the list every year, but the tests Fitzgerald underwent tested a few hundred, and many of them were present in his body, some at alarming levels.

For three weeks, Fitzgerald did multiple therapies - magnetic, hydro, colon cleansing, etc - used no deodorant, shampoos, make up (haha), cologne (perfume, body lotions, etc), and he drank highly purified and then remineralized water, toxin removing wheatgrass, raw fruits and vegies (heat kills enzymes and HHI is a totally raw food lifestyle center). At the end of three weeks, Fitzgerald retested with Accu-Chem and discovered a drastic drop in his toxicity levels in his body.  

He pretty much concludes his book promoting prevention of diseases through lifestyle change and living in harmony with the planet we humans seem so determined to destroy. If we truly want to prevent illness and speeded aging, we shouldn't wait to fix our rooves in the rain ... his astute conclusion.