Day 4 - Is it really day four? Erin's Quinoa Chicken Veggie Soup Recipe

Several things to discuss today... 

First off, I promised my soup recipe.  Quinoa is a grain that can be bought at local health food stores.  In its normal raw state it needs to be rinsed to take the bitter flavor out.   I soak it in water for five minutes and then put it in my fine mesh strainer (sifter) and run the water over it for a couple minutes.  You can also strain it in cheese cloth but I've found my regular kitchen items do the job just fine.  Then I cook it just like rice except instead of water I use organic vegetable or chicken stock.  This gives it much more flavor than if you use water.  I think it's delicious. "Cook just like rice means" 1 part quinoa to 2 parts liquid for about 20 minutes - maybe even less - try not to overcook it.

Erin's Quinoa Chicken Veggie Soup

Ingredients:
1 cup quinoa cooked seperately and set aside
2 parsnips
1/2 of a celery root
4 carrots
1/2 - 1 pound grilled chicken seasoned as you like and cut up for soup
64 oz organic chicken stock
1 - 2 tablespoons organic butter (maybe less if you want to go light)

Basically you set your chicken stock going in a large pot.  Just peel and chop your veggies and then fry them for about 2-3 mins a side and then put in the hot chicken stock in a large pot.  They cook quite quickly once the stock is hot and boiling (maybe 5 minutes).  Then you just add the chicken and the quinoa and make sure its warmed through.  You can eat it right away. 

The way I serve it to myself is to keep my quinoa to the side and ladle my soup onto it, but you don't have to do that.  Also, good in the soup would be other veggies such as onions and mushrooms.  The way I handle the meat is to grill my chicken the night before and eat half the grilled chicken with dinner and save the other half for my soup. 

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Second of all my breakfast was weird.  I finally found kale in a local grocery store.  It is just a gorgeous plant... huge, curly, sturdy, green leaves!  I love it.  So now that I finally found it (I did have to ask the grocer to be sure) I made one of the weird juices for breakfast.  This one is called "Life Force Energy Power-ade" and I'm going to be completely honest here... it was almost disgusting.  It was a lovely velvety and frothy green.  It included 5 large leaves of kale, 4 packets of stevia artificial sweetener (not the 1 or 2 recommended by Natalie Rose, I just couldn't drink it with only 2), 1 whole lemon (peel and all), 1 whole beet, 1 large cucumber, and about 1 inch of fresh ginger (zippy).  Yuck.  I'm not too hard to please either.  Now that it's in me I don't find that it disagrees so far with my system, in fact it seems to bring nice after affects, but it does bring me to an interesting point...  Natalie speaks a lot about getting the average American woman's body chemistry from acidic to alkaline.  Recalll that one lemon - well the juice tasted strongly of lemon - an acidic item.  So...  Let me type up something on that and then make a note for the part I don't understand and want to...

"My first memory of learning about alkaline versus acid was in seventh grade science when we did experiments with litmus paper.  A result of 7 was neutral, above 7 was alkaline, and below 7 was acidic.  Well, our blood chemistry should be 7.4 which is slightly alkaline.  There is no need to check it unless you're either very curious or very sick.  you will know if you are too acidic if you get sick often, get urinary tract infections, suffer from headaches, and have bad breath and body odor (when you do not use antiperspirant).  Acidosis is the medical term for a blood alkalinity of less than 7.35.  A normal reading is called homeostasis.  It is not considered a disease; although in and of itself it is recognized as an indicator of disease.  Your blood feeds your organs and tissues, so if your blood is acidic, your organs will suffer and your body will have to compensate for this imbalance somehow.  We need to do all we can to keep our blood alkalinity high.  The way to do this is to dramatically increase our intake of alkaline-rich elements like fresh, clean air; fresh, clean water; raw vegetables (particularly their juices); and sunlight, while drastically reducing our intake of and exposure to acid-forming substances: pollution, cigarettes, hard alcohol, white flour, white sugar, red meat, and coffee. By tipping the scales in the direction of alkalinity through alkaline diet and removal of acid waste through cleansing, an acidic body can become an alkaline one.

Bear in mind that some substances that are alkaline outside the body like milk, are acidic to the body; meaning they leave an acid residue in the tissues, just as many substances that are acidic outside the body, like lemons and ripe tomatoes, are alkaline and healing in the body and contribute to the body's critical alkaline reserve." - Natalie Rose, Detox For Women, p. 19

The part I don't understand is how lemon and ripe tomatoes become alkaline in the body.  I understand that milk breaks down to an acid... but what about lemon?  Mystery.

Okay next thing to think over...  bowel movements.  Yes, I know, charming. I  won't go into details really but here's where to find it in the book:  Pages 31 - 33 give a very clear explanation of what indicates a healthy detox and what does not.  In short, just having the runs and going to the bathroom every second isn't a healthy detox according to Natalie Rose.  She wants two well-formed bowel movements a day and she explains what that means.  She also has steps to follow to encourage things along because she explains that women especially can get bloated and constipated initially in their detox.  She empahsizes in several places in the book that getting the "old matter" out of the body is very important so if you aren't going, don't ignore that, instead, make it right.  And I will also say that she doesn't think much of herbal cleansers.  She argues they shock the system into purging things but that isn't really getting at the real issue or cleaning the colon.  This, too, I don't know why, I just have to take her word for it now.  But I'll be paying attention and searching for answers to the things I don't understand yet, that's for sure.  She is a fan of gravity-method colon hydrotherapy sessions.  I have heard of them.  Seems a bit freaky, but who knows, I irrigate my sinuses, why not my colon? 


Today I weighed in at: 134.5 lbs.
Still morning so I don't know about food and other things yet.