What I've Been Doing

So, I asked everyone to like my FB page, and I had a wonderful response that warmed the cockles of my heart. Then I went quiet. So, what's going on?

There are several things on the go. First of all, my little tutoring/editing/web support business has been dormant for a while, and I need to revive it. I can't go into details but let's just say employment in my family, which was stable for nearly twenty years, has become precarious. It's a difficult time for us and I need to look into doing my share. It was one of the reasons I got the B.Ed., but that path has turned out, for a variety of reasons, not to be very fruitful so far.

In support of this endeavour, I'm starting a self-hosted website, and while I'm not ready to share it just yet (to be honest, the construction there is not unlike this picture at the moment), it is gobbling up lots of my time. This blog will also be moving to Wordpress at the same time - I had a traumatic experience with Blogger trying to use a screen shot of my FB page for the previous post, and it really accelerated my desire to get off this platform and onto one I can control better. Of course, to do that I have to learn how to control it. How wonderful that I just finished an HTML/CSS course!

There are also three kids off school who seem to think they have some claim to my time. Don't know where they got that idea, silly people.

So I just want to wish everyone a healthy, happy, productive 2013, and may we all get to pursue our heart's desire. Talk to you on the other side.

Like my Facebook Page?

I've added another step on my journey to creating a web presence that will allow me to reach people and offer them my services. I've made a Facebook page for my blog. It used to be that FB would allow you to post blog posts directly to the page, but they've decided, in their infinite wisdom, to disable that feature. That's OK - I do see their point that they were getting too many automated feeds and not enough interactivity. I love talking with you guys, so it's all good.

I'm struggling with all kinds of silly issues - too many names, to begin with. This blog is called My Coat of Many Colours, because my life and my thoughts are so eclectic. My gmail address and Twitter handle involve the name Lionsima, which I've been using for many years and would be reluctant to give up. In the past, I've claimed Beenah Communications as a business name. Following the advice of Dean Dwyer and others, I've claimed HadassEviatar.com as my domain name. Decisions, decisions.

Thank you for travelling this road with me. Any thoughts or suggestions you might have as I learn how to do all of this stuff would be very welcome.

May I Help You?

I wrote a huge long post about things that make me happy, and it made me realise that aside from the obvious such as hanging out with my family, there really are two main things that make me light up. So I deleted everything else and I'm just going to concentrate on those two.

One is learning new things. Some of the happiest times of my life have been when I was a student. Lord knows I'm not wishing to go back to college a la Avenue Q. I mostly enjoy being a grown-up and cooking is definitely one of the joys of my life. But researching, learning, acquiring new skills and using that big brain of mine, so woefully under-stimulated most days, really make me happy. So obviously I need to look for something that allows or even requires me to do that. I've been taking online Continuing Education courses in Technical Communication from my local college and they have made my life so much better. Learning new things was the one part of my life as a research scientist that I loved.

The other thing that makes me happy is helping people. Someone asks for a recipe and woosh, just like that, I can Google it for them. I can teach people to make sauerkraut. I can help them set up a website or Facebook page. I can edit their writing. I've supported a university professor in using Learn. I've tutored high school students. I volunteer for my kids' school and my synagogue as a coordinator, making sure volunteers are in the right place at the right time. I love doing all of that. It isn't even the thanks and kudos, although of course those are very pleasant. It's the act of ascertaining a need and fulfilling it. Helping people was the one part of my job as a high school teacher that I loved.

All of this makes me think that I need to look actively for people to help. I can research topics and write reports about them. I am learning new skills such as website design (in which I've recently finished a course), editing and proofreading (ditto). I should learn more about Excel and Wordpress and find people who need help with them. Because I can learn quickly and well, and many people have less time and inclination than I do for these things.

So, I'll be setting up a website for these things, and I hope you will consider coming to visit, and maybe sending your friends. I would love to help you if I can.

Milk kefir bliss!

I know that a lot of people claim that dairy is too Neolithic to have any place in a paleo-style diet - in fact, I have seen claims that anything you can't pull off a bush or kill with a sharp stick does not belong in our diet. Hmm, a little extreme much? While 10,000 years are a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, the fact remains that many people, especially of dairy-herding heritage, are able to digest dairy products into adulthood with no apparent ill effects. Especially fermented products such as cheese, yoghurt and the subject of today's blog post - kefir.

We are blessed here in Canada with a government that does not permit the use of rBGH (or any other hormones, to my knowledge) in the dairy herd, so that is not an issue. While I would love to buy raw milk, unfortunately that is not legally available in Manitoba (time for a campaign, maybe??). I have to make do with pasteurised milk, but at least it is not ultra-pasteurised (another USAmerican food industry innovation we are blessedly spared), and I can get local whole organic milk at my local health food store. It costs an arm and a leg, of course, but it is worth it to me not to have my boys chugging down antibiotics they don't need.

I myself cannot tolerate plain milk, but I do very well with yoghurt that has been fermented for 24 hours, according to the rules of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. I therefore decided to experiment with milk kefir, which also ferments for 24 hours.

The main difference between them is the starter - you can make yoghurt from a previous batch of yoghurt (although commercial yoghurt really only has a couple of strains of lactobacilli in it - it would be nice to be able to find more!), but for traditional kefir, you need kefir grains. Those aren't really grains - in fact, they are a SCOBY - a Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast. If the word seems familiar, I have rhapsodised here before about my kombucha SCOBY. The kefir SCOBY looks much friendlier than the kombucha one, as you can see in this picture. They really do look like grains.

You can make kefir using a starter from the health food store, but those aren't grains - it's a powder that contains dried bacteria and yeast in a specific combination. It makes decent kefir, but it is self-limiting - it won't grow grains, and after a few iterations you will have to put in more starter. It's from the same company that makes the dried yoghurt starter, and the results are similar - decent, but not comparable to using real, live food.

I was fortunate enough to be given some grains by a lovely lady I met in the Traditional Foods Manitoba Facebook group - and if you are interested in traditional foods and live in Manitoba, I strongly recommend joining that group. Such kind, helpful, welcoming people - friendly Manitobans all. I love it. I met her on a Friday morning, and by Friday noon my grains were luxuriating in a jar of whole milk on my counter. I checked them again after Shabbat went out, so about 30 hours later.

I should warn you that the grains are living things - don't expect them to do their best work as soon as you plop them down in a jar of milk. Mine had been sleeping in a refrigerator for a few months, and it took a couple of rounds before they woke up and really did their job. In fact, the first milk bath I gave them smelled downright awful, and I sent it down the sink. But the grains looked a little plumper and healthier than they had when I first got them, so I was hopeful. The same was true of the second bath, but the third one was just divine, especially once I flavoured it with strawberries.

The way I did that is called a second ferment - I strained the grains out of the thickened kefir (you can tell it is ready when it pulls away from the sides of the jar) and put them safely away in the fridge to nap in a small jar of milk. Then I put the kefir back on the counter, with a few sliced fresh strawberries in it, and left it there for 12 hours.

I cannot begin to tell you how awesome my strawberry-infused kefir tasted, especially after it had been chilled in the fridge. I also got all the goodness of a fermented food, with no ill effects - and trust me, I know about dairy-related ill effects.

How about you, have you tried making something new and exciting recently?

Why Blog?

So I've been going on about these women bloggers I've been hanging out with on FB. One of them asked us why we blog, what benefit we accrue from blogging, what keeps us going.

I gave some kind of flippant answer, but in truth, now that I've been doing this for a while (almost exactly a year, in fact), maybe it really is time to stop and think about the why.

I started this blog as a place to experiment with writing, to see if it was something I could do. I didn't have any particular audience or purpose in mind beyond my immediate family and friends. I called it My Coat of Many Colours because I love Carol King's song Tapestry, in which a character wearing a coat of many colours drifts across the Tapestry of her life. I even explained all of that in this blog post. I am such a classic ADHD person, a drifter and a butterfly and a jack of so many trades. This blog was started as a way to explore all those different interests and passions that I have, trying to figure out what I want to be if I ever grow up. I'm fifty years old now, so you'd think I have a pretty good sense of self, but if anything, I'm more confused now than I was when I was twenty, because I've tried a few things I thought then that I might want and it turns out I was wrong.

So the first purpose of this blog, for me, is to help me figure things out by writing about them. I've never been much of a journal-keeper, but I do find that sometimes thoughts flow out better through my fingers than swirling around in my brain. Obviously I do practise a certain amount of self-censorship, especially as it involves other people.

Another thing this blog has done for me is to help me find new communities. I've joined a couple of blogging groups on Facebook, and both of them have been wonderful. I've developed a passion for local food, and I've met some amazing people through writing about that. I've joined a Paleo Bloggers' group as well, and have learned a lot from reading the blogs there. I'm exploring all kinds of traditional food skills like fermenting and dehydrating, and the blog is one way for me to talk about those beyond a few status updates and pictures on Facebook. I also talk about Judaism. It is indeed a coat of many colours, which means I don't fit into any niche. How beautifully my blog mirrors my life.

I would love to find some way of making a living from blogging, but yeah, so does everybody else out there. Trust Julien Smith to express that with his trademark ferocious succinctness. I'm no Dooce, that's for sure. I've thought of putting affiliate links and stuff like that (not ads) on this blog and I'm afraid my friends will all hate me if I do. Still working that one out. Would you mind if I did? What would you like to see?

So why do I blog? Because it's there. Because there are people out there who actually read it sometimes, and it makes me happy when they do. Because it forces me to articulate my thoughts, just like Ruchi's question in our FB group made me stop and think. Because it's one of the few things in my current life that require discipline, and I need more of that in my ADHD soul. I've actually got my calendar set up to send me a reminder every day to write. It doesn't always happen at the time, but at least I think about it, and that sometimes leads to writing later.

I've often wondered whether I should focus this blog more on one thing and try to turn it into a source of income. Or maybe I should split it up into specialised baby blogs. Or maybe I'm wasting my time trying to "find myself" and I should just suck it up and get a job.

What do you think? If you blog, why do you? If you don't, why not?

Why Blogging About Food in Manitoba is Really Cool

Chef Michael Shafer demonstrates

Sometimes you just have to step out in faith and ask to play with the big kids. I have recently joined a FaceBook group called Manitoba Food Bloggers. I'm fortunate to be in a group there with people like Shel Zolkewich, Rebecca Hadfield, Ron Cantiveros and other luminaries of the Manitoba food blogging world. They talk about food and farming and restaurants in Manitoba and are generally awesome.

Now I am still recovering from an amazing lunch that I enjoyed on Monday, courtesy of Tourism Winnipeg as part of their kickoff of national Tourism Week. In particular, they were launching Peg City Grub, a very cool blog featuring as many as possible of Winnipeg's 1100 restaurants. It is written and photographed by Robin Summerfield, who totally rocks, and not just because she checked out this blog and decided I was a good fit.

The event at the Forks started with a demonstration by Chef Michael Shafer, of Sydney's at the Forks and the newly opened Rudy's Eat and Drink. Not being a pork eater, I am not clear on the details of the tenderloin he was working on, but I do know it involved Fort Garry Dark Ale, and the smell made me hungry.

That was a good thing as we then moved on to an impressive lunch, which I live-tweeted - how nerdy can you get? Luckily so did a few other people, so I didn't feel too freakish. I also got to meet and share a table with some delightful bloggers. Now I have some real-life faces to put to the posts I see in the FB group!

The lunch consisted of a lot of tiny courses, each supplied by a different restaurant at the Forks. I didn't partake of all of them (in particular, I passed on the crab, bison and chicken), but those I had were delectable. A few pictures (by no means everything we were offered!) just to make you hungry, too.

Empanada from Chilean Corner

Greek Salad from Zorba's Pizza

MB pickerel from Fergie's Fish 'n Chips

Seasonal mini-pie from Tall Grass Prairie Bakery

Three-chocolate canolli from Casa Bella

 So now I am really happy I plucked up the courage to ask Robin if this event was only for the important people with big blogs. It wasn't, and that is what this city is like.

Oh, and one more thing. Those awesome folks from Manitoba Food Bloggers are holding a bake sale on Friday at Aqua Books, 274 Garry Street, from 10 am to 2 pm, in support of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day. I will be contributing some almost-paleo brownies, which are currently making my kitchen smell good and about which I will be blogging shortly. I hope to see you there!

Team Pink Couch Potato Lizard Brain

I am the luckiest girl in the world. The writer Holly Jahangiri is my friend and soul sister. Holly recently underwent a radical mastectomy and DIEP reconstruction. She has not quite finished the process - she says she currently has Barbie boobs. She has more surgery scheduled in October to make her look like a human woman again. All of this while working full-time, writing children's books and raising a family.

Tonight on Facebook, Holly graciously invited her myriad followers to donate to my cause, and also gifted me with a name for my team - Team Pink Couch Potato Lizard Brain. While I cannot use this lovely name this year, as I am already a member of the somewhat more staidly named National Council of Jewish Women team, I am looking forward to printing pink business cards next year, with which I will undoubtedly lure thousands.

The Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation CIBC Run for the Cure uses as its logo the somewhat ungrammatical but highly poignant question: Who are You Running For? Suppressing the unworthy desire to vandalise the pretty picture I am currently using as my Facebook avatar, there are many people for whom I am running. First and foremost is my own mother, who went for a free mammogram on a whim at the age of fifty and discovered an encapsulated tumour in her left breast. She had a lumpectomy and radiation, and eventually died of the complications of diabetes instead. That is a whole 'nother blog post. There are quite a few young (thirties and forties) mothers in my community who are struggling with this disease, and a couple of them have lost the fight. Few experiences are more heartbreaking than watching children follow their mother's casket, and thinking of all the milestones she will not see. While many people have railed against the dominance of the pink ribbon among all the different cancer research foundations and the evils of pinkwashing, seeking a cure for breast cancer remains a worthy cause. Maybe my next run will be for diabetes or for ovarian cancer. But for now, this is my focus and my friend Holly is the undisputed queen of Team Pink Couch Potato Lizard Brain.

If you were running on October 2nd, for whom would you run?