Black Forest Cream of Mushroom Soup, or whatever it's called, is GOOD! It is great, actually, and the recipe makes a ton, so bam, it rocks.

I made this smoothie my mom told me about: mango, lime, spinach, a little stevia, water. Really good too!

Made a good smoothie today. Samantha shared some. It always makes me happy when other people in my family eat a really healthy thing. I know it's doing so much good for their bodies.

Last night Samantha helped me through the whole process of making kale potato soup. She was very enthusiastic. And everybody ate the soup for dinner last night! Ate it up with no complaints, both kids, and with no extrinsic reward for doing so! It was beautiful.

I saw something that inspired me yesterday, that I felt was really quite true. When I was a teenager and had begun having joint problems and menstrual cycle problems, and was looking for answers, I came across the raw food diet online, and ordered a copy of the book by Victoria Boutenko, Twelve Steps to Raw Foods. In it, the author, a beautiful loving mother of two children, tells the story of their family emigrating to the United States from Russia, and of the declines they all experienced in their health that resulted in a crisis, and how out of this crisis she discovered the raw food diet and felt strongly that that was what their family needed, that was their hope to restore their health. Fast forward to now, both their children are grown, and they still remain true to what their mother taught them, they are still advocates for the raw food diet with a strong emphasis on fresh vegetables. I read an article yesterday by the daughter in this family, Valya Boutenko, that made me think about how I treat and speak to my children, and that reminded me of the importance, and affirmed the possibility of, parenting with absolute love. The article was mostly discussion parenting in reference to how to help children to make healthy food choices, but I felt that the principles could apply universally to how we teach our children anything. I can be that kind of parent. And as I am that kind of parent, it will be so much better for keeping my children close to me, and so much better for relationships, and helping them to see their potential and to recognize their relationship to everything else in the universe, and to feel Peace. I connected with what she was saying on a spiritual level, and I was grateful for that because I'd read a few chapters from Numbers and Deuteronomy for my personal scripture study, and that just wasn't doing it for me spiritually yesterday.

My husband is wonderful. Today was the best Mother's Day ever.

My joint pain gets less and less. It is all but gone today. It is so blissful to feel like a whole person, warm, nourished. I want everyone who is in pain to find what will help their pain go away.

It's been going surprisingly well, making two separate dinners. Last night I only made 1 dinner, fried rice and stir fried vegetables, and I just ate a LOT of the vegetables while everyone else ate like normal people.

Today I'm planning on making this "black mushroom" something or other from Eat For Health. We'll see how that is. I don't have strong feelings about mushrooms either way.

I still have pain in my knees and elbows, with the pain being worse on the right side. Pain in tailbone still there too. But it is manageable. And I have been eating well for enough days in a row that the dark awful feelings have left me and I feel good.

I'll report how the mushroom soup turns out. Tonight there is enough in the fridge for leftovers for everyone else, and I'll have this soup, or a sweet potato soup recipe I've got the ingredients for.

Looks like it will be a gorgeous day, so once the soup is made, time to take Glenn out somewhere.

Last night, we didn't have any more mixed frozen vegetables, so I had taco salad with lentils and tomato sauce, Daiya (fake cheese), salsa, avocado, lettuce, and peas.

Today I sauteed kale in peanut-soy sauce, with onion. My elbow hurts. I need to trust that this is okay, God is in control, yes I have pain but there is a reason and whether there is a solution or not, I need to have faith. Today I bought mixed frozen veg so made the soup with black beans and broccoli and carrot juice. It wasn't really yummy, but wasn't total yuck, so I ate it for dinner and made the family chicken fajitas.

Recipes to Try

Five of each of smoothies, salads, soups/stews, and non-soup dinners I want to try out in the next little while:

Smoothies
1. The one my mom told me about that has frozen mango, spinach, fresh mint, and coconut milk
2. Eat Your Greens fruit smoothie from Eat For Health
3. spinach, pear, banana, hemp seed
4. spinach, apple, grape, banana, hemp seed
5. blueberry, strawberry, spinach, milk, banana, hemp seed

Salads
1. Citrus Salad with Orange Peanut Dressing (EFH 121)
2. Balsamic Mixed Greens with Chopped Apples (EFH 120)
3. Greek Chickpea Salad (EFH 123)
4. Greens and Berries Salad with Cashew Currant Dressing (EFH 125)
5. Healthy Slaw (EFH 128)

Soups/Stews
1. Black Forest Cream of Mushroom Soup (EFH 165)
2. Chunky Sweet Potato Stew (EFH 167)
3. Dr. Fuhrman's Famous Anti-Cancer Soup (EFH 168)
4. French Minted Pea Soup (EFH 171)
5. Hearty Ginger Lentil Soup (EFH 173)

Non-soup Dinners
1. Artichokes with Dipping Sauce (EFH 203)
2. Asparagus with Black Fig Dressing (EFH 208)
3. Baked Potato Fries (EFH 211)
4. Black Bean Lettuce Bundles (EFH 212)
5. Braised Bok Choy (EFH 213)

This poor neglected blog!

There is a chocolate smoothie recipe in the book "Eat for Health" that is very yummy. I made it yesterday and the kids shared some with me, but there was enough left to put in the freezer for another day. So there is that to eat sometime today or tomorrow.

Also, there are a few avocados that are ripe that I can put on salads, or on the black bean soup I'm making tonight for dinner.

My family was not always too happy with the things I was making for dinner, so I am making two separate dinners tonight: spaghetti for them with some ground turkey meatballs and red sauce, and I am making a black bean vegetable soup for me, that I can put avocado on top of. The recipe calls for a few things I don't have, like carrot juice and fresh tomatoes. I'm going to use canned tomatoes and just substitute vegetable broth for the carrot juice.

I felt really good today after the salad I had for lunch. It was spring greens and romaine, with some cut up pears and grapes cut in half, and some dressing that was just sugar and oil and vinegar, basically, leftover from a salad I'd made a few weeks ago. It really helped my knees.

A little while later I ate a few more plain grapes and a banana, and didn't feel as good after that, but everything is still okay.

I figured out that I shouldn't really eat things that have gluten, like wheat, which means no regular pasta, which I'm sad about. But it is okay, there are still lots of things I can have that are healthy and yummy. When I eat wheat pasta it makes me feel a little crazy and out of control or depressed and frustrated and hopeless. It is really uncomfortable to feel that way. And it also hurts my knees. Last night we had white pasta with miso sauce and tofu, and that really made my knees hurt and did all the other owie things to me and made me feel crazy. And a lot of times the next morning after I have eaten white pasta or something bready like pizza, the next morning I have intestinal cramping that is really not fun at all first thing in the morning. I don't really like thinking about all this because it is negative, but I do want to remember and not forget later and think it's okay to eat stuff like that and it will all be fine. The other thing that happened yesterday after dinner was my face and neck and arms got itchy, especially my face, and I had patches on my arms that were really itchy. It's all gone now, no itchiness anymore. I think that might be related to gluten, too, although a while ago it happened after I had rice krispie treats, and I don't think there's any gluten on those. The only thing I've eaten today is two bowls of salad.

My brother has psoriosis and he thinks maybe I have psoriatic arthritis. I hadn't heard of that before, but who knows. I don't have psoriosis, though. I guess you don't have to have it on your skin...some people just have it in their joints. But it is auto-immune, just like asthma and allergies and IBS and rheumatoid arthritis. All these things we go through are really I think just because Heavenly Father wants us back, we are his kids, and whatever we have to go through that is not fun, in order to get us to come to Him and trust Him, He'll make us go through. He wants us to learn, and wants us back I think.

Day 30

I don't know why I'm counting days anymore when I'm totally screwing up the 6-week plan. I eat snacks and stuff, and eat more grains than I'm supposed to. Today I didn't eat any grains, though. I did snack, though.

For breakfast I added some strawberries and blueberries to my kermit the frog crazy creamy greenie smoothie from the other day, and those berries improved it BIG TIME. It was suddenly extremely yummy, when before I was just kinda taking little bites trying to enjoy it.

Lunch I made this Guacamole Goddess Dressing, and had it on a salad, with some thawed "mixed vegetables" and kidney beans. I think I'd like that dressing better as a dip, too, like Susan says in her blog post. But my salad was good.

Dressing ingredients before being blended.



We went to a cool Korean market last Saturday and I picked up some tofu on the cheap, that comes in cool looking packaging with neato Korean writing all over it. Can I read any of it? Of course not. Fortunately some stuff's written in English, so I knew this was silken, organic, non-gmo.


For dinner I made a stir-fry, basing the sauce and tofu marinade on this recipe.

Here's tofu, cookin in it's marinade.


Mmm...tofu and vegetables in a yummy sauce. Life is good.


Older kid with a snap pea in her face. I love this girl.

Day 29

I keep eating too many grains.
Breakfast was some Creamy Greenie Smoothie. Couldn't eat it all. Lunch was a whole wheat pita stuffed with chickpeas, tomato, lettuce, avocado, and mustard. Dinner was Asian Vegetable Stir-Fry from Eat For Health. It was okay but we did not really like the sauce. We've made much better stir-fry sauces in the past. Then we had apple slices, and tortilla chips with guacamole. That was an indulgence of a late evening grain habit I must break.

I read this article which doesn't cite any sources, but if it's true, it explains a lot for me. I think at least some of these points are true. I need to stay away from at least some grains. I would like to learn whether sprouting them does anything to change some of those negative side-effects.