Awakening the Dream in George Town...

On Sunday, we had our second raw/living foods potluck of the season in George Town. It was a fabulous event of spiritually connected souls. Satya and Diane shared from their hearts, their vision for the world and introduced us to the work of The Pachamama Alliance. Watch the trailer at:
http://awakeningthedreamer.org/
Symposiums are currently being planned here in The Exuma's and one of the first will be held at 9:30am on Saturday January 30th at The St Francis Resort as a fund-raiser for the George Town Elementary Schools and The Haiti Relief Fund. Contact Brydle Anchor on Channel 68 for further information.
Take a moment and enjoy the energy of http://www.firethegrid.com/eng09/FTGI-2011.htm
Let us be conscious custodians of this beautiful planet.
with love,
Jan

Sprouting Resources

Why Sprout?
Alana Mitchell in her recently released book would say that all life on the planet as we know it is at stake and shares with us the importance of allowing the earth and most critically our oceans, to heal. Eating organically in order to avoid industrial farming practises on land and at sea critical and of paramount importance. What we choose to put into our bodies is the largest contributing factor to global warming. We are the custodians of our planet. Our planet is a living entity. Only we as individuals can ensure that we pass it to our grandchildren in a means that will support life. Sprouting also reduces transportation costs which affect our environment.
http://www.alannamitchell.com/seasick.html

Dr T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study, the most extensive nutritional study ever conducted according to the New York Times, would say that a plant-based diet is critical the our health as individuals. The amount of protein from non-plant sources recommended in the food guide is responsible for the Western diseases we observe in our society. The protein 'casein' within dairy is of great consequence so reducing one's intake of red meat or eating organic flesh doesn't begin to touch the problem.
Dr Campbell talks about the fact that although we have traditionally been taught that flesh has all the necessary amino acids to make up what we've considered 'quality' protein, it's not by any means the best means of getting our protein since our bodies need to dissasemble the amino acid chain and then reassemble these same amino acids in the specific order that we as humans require. This requires a great deal of energy in terms of digestion. Sprouts are pre-digested protein and are already broken down into amino acids; as such, they are much easier to digest.
http://www.thechinastudy.com/about.html
http://tcolincampbell.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XzDOGZKI68&feature=related

Sprouts are a cost-effective means of feeding ourselves live, organic food at a reasonable cost. Getting into the habit of soaking new seeds in the moment that I harvest the previous 'round' enabled me to get into a new habit that takes little time and enables us to eat organically which is something that would otherwise be extremely difficult here in The Bahamas and very costly even at home.

R and B Lalonde in The Provisioning Bible stress the importance of maintaining an alkaline environment within one's body in order to prevent the developement of health issues. Sprouts are an alkaline source of protein. They strongly believe that this is the basis of our Western degernerative diseases.

Raw/living foods ensure that we acquire the enzymes we require to digest our food and preserve the limited number of enzymes that we already have within us are preserved for other functions such as the restoration of our bodies at the cellular level.

Dr Gabriel Cousens in You Can Heal Diabetes in 21 Days refers to the Max Plank Institute in Bonne Germany in 2002 having proven that when we heat our food above 105 degrees, we coagulate 50% of the protein, 70-90% of the vitamins and minerals, and up to 100% of the phytonutrients including the all-important Resveratrol associated with anti-aging. Calorie-reduced diets have long been proven to be associated with longevity. Because we're getting more nutrition by not heating our foods above 105 degrees, we need that much less food to get the same amount of nutrition which makes this a calorie-reduced diet.

You can read about the reasons for adopting a raw living foods diet at the following site:
http://www.hippocratesinst.org/Library/Articles-.aspx
http://www.hippocratesinst.org/Library/Recordings.aspx
The Hippocrates Health Institute is a 45 minute drive from Indian Town FL so we often go for dinner there in the evenings when we're getting our boat ready in the fall or putting it away in the Spring. Call ahead to make reservations for the all-you-can eat $20 per person live food buffet.

Where to get seeds:
Darval Lumber just north of George Town has sunflower, buckwheat and pea sprouting seeds for soil sprouts that can also be grown hydroponically.
http://www.eatorganicbuffalo.com/SPROUTINGSEED.html
http://www.sprouting.com/
http://sproutman.com/
http://www.gotsprouts.com/
http://www.sproutpeople.com/

How to go about sprouting:
http://hippocratesgreenhouse.com/
http://www.sproutpeople.com/grow/sprouting.html

The photo at the top of this entry is a photo of the area we use to sprout jar sprouts in our boat. Dave had the stainless steel tray made by Stainless Outfitters, a company in Barrie Ontario that made the bow roller for our boat and then made a teak frame that he mounted in order to hold the jars in place. This year, I'm sprouting in glass jars that fit inside plastic jars that appear in the photo.

Ways to eat sprouts:
Make 'live' bread, muffins and cookies with sprouted grains such as wheat, hulless oats and buckwheat.
Use sprouted beans and lentils in salads, salad dressings, dips, soups, pates, and burgers.
Make crackers from soaked flax seed.
Make cheeze, mylk and yogurt from soaked nuts and seeds.

Links to recipes:
Use the 'search' feature within www.rawketscience.blogspot.com to find yummy recipes for any of the above. This is the blog of my friend in Toronto who is the executive chef of a very high-end raw food restaurant in the midst of opening in Yorkville.
Tomato Sauce: http://rawketscience.blogspot.com/2007/04/italian-in-thailand-who-goes-to.html
Burgers: http://rawketscience.blogspot.com/2006/12/sinterklaas-and-sunburgers.html
Crackers: http://rawketscience.blogspot.com/2007/01/flax-crackers-and-rawjuvenate-site.html
Pizza Sandwich Bread: http://rawketscience.blogspot.com/2006/10/muchas-cosas-pizza-bread-tulsi.html
Thai Vegetable Wraps with Tamarand Dipping Sauce: http://nymag.com/restaurants/articles/recipes/thaivegetablewraps.htm

Other sites where you can find raw food recipes:
http://www.rawketscience.com/flash/index.html
http://www.therawdivas.com/HHH/articles.php?articles=rfrecipes
Do a Google search for 'raw food recipes' and you'll find 80,800,000 sites!
Contact me on Siggy's Dancer on Channel 68 and I'll be glad to share my recipes with you...

Fun on the Ocean...

On Sunday, we went sailing on the ocean with George and Gail on Star. It was a perfect day!

Yesterday, Gail, Jan and Sylvie joined me on an afternoon walk on the ocean beach. It was a great day for collecting shells.

Here's a photo of Sylvie, Jan and Gail with our anchage in the background. Our's is the smallest boat, sixth from the right in the fore-front of the picture. Life is good.

Another Lovely Day...

It was our friend Bill on Rosinante's birthday today.

Bill is a former chair of the George Town Cruising Regatta which takes place here each year (http://www.georgetowncruisingregatta.org/). This year he's volunteered to help organize the selling of t-shirts until the chair of that activity arrives. We volunteered to sell t-shirts yesterday with Ted and Judy of Helen-Irene and Nancy and Chris of Liberty. Chris, who is twelve years of age and home-schooled, greeted everyone who arrived at the dinghy dock with an invitation to purchase a t-shirt. He was a definate asset to our sales team! Proceeds of the sales help to support the cruising regatta as well as The National Family Island Regatta (http://www.exumabahamas.org/article-family-island-regatta.html) which is a Bahemian regatta.

The following are some photos of George Town. This is the straw market where women fondly known as 'the straw ladies' weave baskets and sell their home grown vegetables. The tomatoes are amazingly tasteful! Yesterday, I met Arizona who is a timeless eighty-year-old who had a family of ten. Amazing...

This is Regatta Park where a variety show is held on the last night of the George Town Cruising Regatta.

This is a photo of the main street.

You can see the government building at the end of the street in this photo.

This is a photo of the local library with bleachers left over from the December 26th Junkanoo Festival still set-up in front.

We spent the rest of the day with our raw food friends, Ralf, Birguitte and Pascalle. Aloe Vera is everywhere on their property.

Prickly Pear is an edible wild. The young pads, called nopalitos, with soft immature spines, can be used as a component of a dip, diced and included in a salad, peeled and marinated. The ripe fruit, often called tuna, should be picked with thick gloves and are edible raw, sliced into a fruit salad.

This is a more mature chia plant, referred to in a recent blog. It is edible when boiled.

Agave plants from which agave nectar is collected grow wild along the road-side in The Exumas.

Here are some of Birguitte's baby greens. This first tray is barley, grown in soil.

These are sunflower seeds; great nutrition at a fabulous price and most people's favourite!

For dinner, Birguitte made a beautiful salad of baby greens with onions and tomatoes grown by 'the straw ladies' at the market. The dressing was made from a fresh coconut.

We also had a salad made from spiralized pumpkin with onions and a bit of Bragg's.

The spiralized beet salad had a lime dressing.

We felt blessed to be together once again and to be sharing the finest food on Earth.

We made our way back to our boat in our dinghy under a galaxy of stars with Ralf and Birguitte's copy of Victoras Kulvinskas's book entitled Survival Into The 21st Century in my back-pack. This is one of Ralf's favourite books which I've meant to read for some time now. It is sub-titled Planetary Healers Manual.

January Days...

We've been having fun in these first days of the new year. My new wet suit makes staying in the water much more comfortable.

The chia plants that my friend Sylvie planted on Stocking Island from our raw food friends' garden last year survived the drought this past summer and are slowing establishing themselves. They need to be cooked prior to eating.

The edible wild is called the Seven Year Apple because it takes along time to ripen. As an experiment, I'm going to put a piece of netting around one piece of fruit that is half black (they're ripe when they're black) so that the birds don't eat it before I can!

Here's a photo from the beach walk that we take most afternoons.

I find the scenery breath-taking.

It was a relatively calm day.

Sargassum seaweed was on special!

We had nine people for dinner and the sprouts were well received.

Plastic tops from peanut butter jars placed under the plastic needlepoint sheets (guage #10) prevent the roots of the baby greens from rotting.

This is what the alph alpha seeds looked like a few hours after I transferred them to the trays from the jar in which I had originally soaked and sprouted them.

Life is good.

Perfect Weather!

Sylvie, co-owner of the boat Whisper, and I went for a walk on the windward side of Stocking Island yesterday and were greeted by this tiny sea ray as we landed our dinghy on the leeward side.

This is Sea Pursaline, an edible plant that I routinely gather on my walks each afternoon and use in salads or serve with a dip. It has a nice crunch to it.

This is a view of Gaviotta Bay where we're now on a mooring ball since Dave leaves on January 8th to visit family at home for a week. It's a protected anchorage and close to everything going on.

Sylvie is from Iowa. Her two sons kite-surf on this ocean beach on the windiest of days.

And yes, we had most of the beach to ourselves!

The sand was perfect for walking.

This is one of our favourite places. The rocks form a barrier to what we call 'the spa', a heavenly place to bathe at low tide.

We like to meditate here. The fossil formations that you see below are called Stromatolites (http://www.scienceresearch.duq.edu/bio/biofac/jstolz/RIBS/publ/Brochure2.pdf)and and exist in very few places on Earth. They are made up of the exo-skeletins of bacteria is responsible for giving off oxygen. Life on earth would not exist without them. I always think we should post a notice advising people not to walk on them. There's a hole in the midst of this particular section from which water gushes up after waves of any size come in from sea.

We stayed longer than we had planned which is easy to do, of course.

The sun was setting as we made our way back over the burn to our dinghy and the anchorage.

It's another perfect day in The Exuma's and our first sunflower sprouts of the season are doing quite well!

With any luck, we'll have them for New Year's dinner tomorrow. Tonight, we're off to a party at the St Francis Marina and Resort(http://www.stfrancisresort.com/) They have rooms overlooking the ocean beach which are worth considering if you're interested in spending time here. We'd love to see you!

A Christmas Weekend at Redshanks

The cold front continued on Christmas morning as we made our way south past an anchorage called Sand Dollar where some lovely and expensive boats were anchored. Smile. Two year's ago, Braveheart was anchored there. Three year's ago we spoke unknowingly to the Wurtz family, owners of Black Hawk. One never knows with whom you're chatting on the beach.

Our plan was to spend Christmas with our raw food friends, Ralf, Birguitte and Pascalle, whose boat name is Tacelopes, in the well-protected Redshank's anchorage.

The scenery as we made our way there was breath-taking.

A study of the sky is always mesmerizing.

Photos similar to those found in tourist magazines are easy to take.

Redshanks is well protected and a great choice for a cold front.

We've been sprouting of course. This is a photo of the set-up for our jar sprouts. Dave made a wooden grid of teak to support the jars at an angle and had a stainless steel drainage tray custom made. It works very well, even under sail. Here you see quinoa, lentils and adzuki beans. The photo shows half the width of the sprouting rack which holds six jars in total with room for more in the soaking stage.

Here, you can see sunflower seeds planted in trays with ankle weights used to weight them down. This year, we're trying something new. We have three trays of soil piled one on top of the other. We intend to flip the first root map for our second crop, use the second tray for our third and fourth crops, the third tray for our fifth and sixth crops, and with any luck the first tray which will have been composting on the bottom will be ready to be used again for our seventh and eighth crops. We'll let you know how the plan goes.

So far, the alph alpha and clover baby greens have been doing well. I learnt to put the lids of peanut butter jars under the plastic needlepoint sheets in order to avoid 'root rot' caused by insufficient drainage. Birguitte has suggested that I put a drop of freshly squeezed lime juice rather than my usual food grade hydrogen peroxide in the spray water. Her sprouts are amazing so I'll definately give this a try. I use hydrogen peroxide in the soak water.

In this photo, you can see our boat decorated for Christmas with greeting cards I've saved from past years hung on the hand-rails.

Space is definately at a premium.

But what a beautiful place to be...

In the end, our friends weren't able to come on Christmas Day because their vehicle wouldn't start, but the next morning was another beautiful day and we looked forward to their arrival.

Our friends sailed from Germany in the early '80s, began eating a raw food diet fifteen years ago. Ten years ago they bought and cleared land here in The Bahamas in order to build a house. They live totally off the grid. This is a boat they purchased a couple of years ago and not the one they did their crossing on. It has a daggerboard which is a terrific feature on the shallow banks of The Bahamas.

We had a lovely raw food dinner together, all be it a day later than planned.

Our friend Robin (http://www.rawketscience.blotspot.com/) inspired me to make pizza. Yummm!!!

And December 27th was another lovely day.

We had our first meal of the day with our raw food friends on their boat and enjoyed their signature breakfast made of fresh grapefruit, oranges and almonds processed in their VitaMix which is powered by a 1200 WATT inverter. What a great way to begin the day!

With that, we went to the beach to exercise. It's prestine...

And a great place to harvest the Sargassum seaweed that I'm adding to my smoothies each day. At first, I just used the berries but soon used the entire plant. Lately, I've been dehydrating and then puverizing it in the grinder so that I can easily add it to anything. It looks identical to the powdered kelp we purchased on-line.

I also use fresh Aloe Vera leaves from our raw food friends' garden. I fillet one leaf per day and include an inch of the flesh which aids with regularity.

The scenery is spectaular.

You can easily have a beach to yourself here.

This is a photo of our dinghy anchored amongst mangroves in Redshank's.

Dave got some unscheduled exercise. Smile.

This was dinner on the 27th. We used ground raw sesame seeds as a substitute for parmesan on our zucchini pasta with raw marinara sauce and re-hydrated mushrooms. Tacelopes grinds sesame seeds and eats them with honey as a snack. We wrapped shredded cabbage and carrots in nori sheets. Tacelopes' house dressing is made with fresh coconut.

On Monday, we made our way back to our anchorage at Volleyball Beach. These are photos of the sunrise on Tuesday morning. It's all very beautiful!