Earth Hour March 28, 2008

This is a very important event, coming up this Saturday.
I am just a messenger…

“On March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m., join millions of people around the world in making a statement about climate change by turning off your lights for Earth Hour, an event created by the World Wildlife Fund.

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.

What will you do when the lights are off? We have lots of ideas.

Join people all around the world in showing that you care about our planet and want to play a part in helping to fight climate change. Don’t forget to sign up and let us know you want to join Earth Hour.

One hour, America. Earth Hour. Turn out for Earth Hour!”

There is also an event that has been going on called GAIA Summit.

http://www.do-summit.jp/en/

People in Japan will be turning off their lights for 2 hours from 6pm for the next 100 days starting this Sunday, March 30th, counting down to the Hokkaidou GAIA Summit. I found out about this event just in time, we will be participating in this event from Sunday. I guess we can combine the 2 events and start together Saturday! Start buying those candles!!

“The Group of Eight (G8) Summit is an annual meeting attended by the leaders of eight countries-Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America-and by the President of the European Commission. A “summit” in the strict sense is a meeting of heads of state, but it often refers also to meetings of foreign ministers and finance ministers prior to meetings by heads of state. In these years, non-G8 countries are also participating in the G8 Summit. For instance, the so-called emerging countries such as Republic of South Africa, Brazil, China, Mexico and India have participated in the 2007 Heiligendamm Summit held in Germany as well as many African nations and international organizations.”

Please join me with millions of people around the world for this wonderful event!

My Okayu (rice porridge) March 25, 2008

This past weekend, I have gotten the comment, “That’s gross. If that’s what I have to eat, I would never be Japanese!” This is about the Okayu.

The same group of people were also making fun of my Organic Loving, Tree Hugger lifestyle.
So, for those of you living in the woods, who have never learned about Global Warming and is just gaining those tons of pounds from your hormone injected, 3 times faster growing animals. Please stop reading this blog. I don’t think this blog is right for you. You may just want to keep idealizing this and not come back to my page. Oh, and I recommend you to buy this.

Any who, after the venting, I am coming back to introduce to you the delicious recipe of my Brown Rice Okayu.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup brown rice
• 30 grams soba (buckwheat noodles) – optional
• 8 cups water
• 1 tsp Chinese Dashi (chicken broth)
• 1/8 cup Daikon Radish (or any other radish or carrot) sliced into small bite size pieces. Oh, Nappa cabbage is good too!
• 1 knob about 5 slices of ginger
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp soy sauce
• small piece of leftover salmon (optional)
• 5 cm of long onion (garnishment)
• pinch of toasted sesame seeds (garnishment)

Rinse out the rice with water and leave it in a large pot with 6 cups of water (covered) for at least 30 min. (If you don’t have time, just leave it in hot water while boiling the soba) Meanwhile break the Soba noodles into small pieces and boil it in some water (2 of the 8 cups) for 5 min. Drain Soba, and set aside.

(I’m cooking with my 2&3/4qt. Le Creuset pot.)

Put the pot with the rice & water on medium heat and start adding the Dashi, Daikon, Ginger, Salt, and Soy Sauce. (You could add a piece of chicken leg or wing, that’s really good!) When it starts to simmer, cover and turn the heat down to LOW. Cook for about 40 min. Add the Soba, and cook for another 10 min. Turn heat off and let it sit for 15 min. with the lid on.

Garnish with the salmon, thinly sliced long onion and some sesame seeds. Yummm

This recipe is very healthy, great for dieting, and fantastic for your digestion. Make a lot and you can freeze 250 gram portions (160 Kcal) & have it for breakfast every morning!

Or just don’t eat it because you’re afraid to be healthy and turn into someone who is JAPANESE!!

Fear of the Poo~ March 22, 2008

I hate training my toddler to go to the potty. I don’t think I have the patience for it. But we have been trying since last August and it’s starting to NOT work… It really sucks.
I even made my own training pants, thinking that some cute pair of polka dot pants would actually get her enthusiastic to wear them. SO Wrong.

On top of that my daughter has developed a mild case of chronic constipation, because she doesn’t want to poop in the toilet. She holds her poo in so that she doesn’t have to go. But when she does go, the poo is so hard that it is ginormous and hurts to come out. She even bleeds…
I’ve been told to change her diet, stop potty training, eat prunes and drink prune juice, & all the above. There seems to be no short cuts for this one.

Here are a few ways that I started tackling this poo.

Changing her diet:

• More fruits that have more water in them. (clementines, grapes, berries, water melon, cantaloupe, pears)
• Lots of dried fruits. (raisins, prunes, dried blueberries, cranberries, cherries, Fig Newmans) Don’t give too many prunes, or it gets messy. Not fun… Try half a prune a day. Other dried fruit, can be consumed in 1/4 cup portions, I think.
• Orange juice, pear juice, prune juice. We always dilute 1 part OJ, 1 part Vruit, 1 part water. Always dilute your Toddlers juice to about 30~40% water.
• No white rice. Sad news for a Japanese person, but we changed my favorite white rice to all brown rice. This was a gradual process. 1 part white rice/1 part brown, to 2 part brown/1 part white.
  Brown rice is tricky. If you cook it the same way you cook as white rice, it turns out a bit hard, and kids don’t like that. If you have a rice cooker that has the brown rice setting, you are in luck. For those with who don’t, just leave the brown rice in water over night, like you do with beans and then cook the following day.
• More high fiber. (beans, whole wheat, multi-grain, broccoli, kale, spinach, brussele sprouts, etc.)
• Eat less dairy. We changed our butter to vegan butter, and my daughter doesn’t like cheese that much, so that’s easy. Biggest obstacle is that she needs her milk, morning, noon and night. Three 8oz. bottles a day. I guess it’s supposed to be about 16oz. of low fat milk a day, so I am starting at 90% of 2% milk mixed with 10% soy milk or water. It will be a gradual process for us.
• Avoid bananas, most dairy, chocolate, red meat, cooked carrots, and french fries.
  Red meat is hard for anyone to digest. Quit red meat for a couple of months and it will do a number on your stomach when you try it again.
• Raw vegetables. Thank you Wonder Pets for helping my daughter like celery!

So following some of this diet, how about a menu.

Breakfast (All Served with a 50% OJ)

• Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal
• Whole Wheat Toast with Mixed Berry Jam and Prune Puree
• Brown Rice Okayu (Rice Porridge)
• Whole Grain Cereal (Raisin Bran, Shredded Wheat, Clifford, etc. )

Lunch (Served with sliced Tomato’s & Cucumbers)

• Tuna on Toasted Whole Wheat with Celery, Raisins and Green Apples
• Lentil Soup with Whole Wheat Toast or Whole Wheat Pasta Shells
• Vietnamese Pho made with Harusame (Bean Noodles)
• Soba Noodles with Kamaboko (Fish Cake) and Wakame (Sea Weed) or my daughters favorite with Natto (Japanese fermented beans). If your Japanese, you will understand.

Snack Time (serve with 50% juice of your choice)

• 杏仁豆腐(Annindoufu: Skim Milk Gelatine with Seasonal Fruit)
• Sliced Apples with Peanut Butter and Whole Wheat Crackers
• Whole Wheat Fruit Danish
• きな粉クッキー(Kinako Cookies: soybean flour cookies)

Dinner (serve with diluted kids tea with no sugar)

• Baked Fish Taco’s with Whole Beans
• Whole Wheat Shells with Meat Sauce & Tomato Salad
• Miso-Mayo Salmon with Vegetable Miso Soup
• ニラ餃子 (Nira Gyouza: Chinese Chive Pot Stickers) with Daikon Soup

Dessert (I don’t really recommend giving sugar after 3:00)

• Just Plain Fruits could work if you need any.

So now, all I have to do is give her a routine of sitting on the toilet and having her try to poop at the same time every day, which is right after lunch. Zu (my daughter) is still scared of pooping, tries to poop in the toilet once a day. Not yet successful, but we have hope! They say it takes about 6 to 12 months to correct this whole thing. Agh!!

We started to change our diet drastically 2 weeks ago, and we are already seeing results. She is not in pain when she is having a bowl movement any more, and she’s been going 3~4 times a week now instead of 2~3.

The only bad thing out of this whole thing, is that potty training is still a pain in the A, for me. I’ll keep you posted on other dishes I come up with. I will be uploading these recipe’s when I get the chance and link them to this page, so keep checking.

So here I go! March 18, 2008

My first post!

I guess I should start out with a short introduction of myself.

I was born in Japan, grew up in the United States for most of my life.

I’m a mom, a wife, an artist, a cook. I love the idea of reducing my carbon footprint in this world, so I try very hard to have our family be as green as possible.

I cook with mostly Organic ingredients, because I believe that it is healthier for my family and I also think it tastes better. But there are a lot of obstacles, being green. One of the biggest hurdle for me is the amount of green (money) you have to dish out to buy things that are supposedly GREEN. Organic food is a bit more pricey, so I mainly concentrate on getting all dairy, meats, and eggs organic, but the rest I try.

My daughter is almost 3 and it’s awesome to be able to stay home and raise her to speak Japanese. English is my first language, but I do speak Japanese fluently as well. My husband is American and his Japanese is not as good as my daughters. It is very important to me that she grows up bilingual. I really would like her to know her heritage, language and all.

Being an artist, taking care of a baby-toddler, took away one of the most important thing in my life, which is being creative. We decided for me to stay home because I wasn’t comfortable in leaving my child with a stranger, after interviewing an at home day care that the owners husband was arrested for child molestation charges the year before. I’m sure there are plenty of good day cares out there, but if the first one you interview is the one I did, you would do the same.
Anyway, being crafty with a little one is not easy… Actually it can’t happen. So I started cooking and baking A LOT. This turned into my creative outlet, plus we are a single income family, so we have to cook at home every night. $100 feeds the 3 of us for a week( lunch & dinner). I will have a lot of these recipe’s and menus on the site to inspire people to eat at home.
Now that my daughter is a little bit bigger, she gives me time to relax now that I’ve just started to sew a bit again. Which is so exciting!

I had really bad postpartum depression, that I finally just started to come out of at the end of last year. I did not take any medication, and I feel that I have truly kicked this depression at the core. My husband is the greatest. I can’t even express in words how grateful I am for how supportive he is through all of this. I’m so lucky.

So, this is who I am in a nutshell. Through this blog I will be sharing things and thoughts that I find that help my life be happier.

Enjoy! ようこそ(welcome)