Scratch Cooking February 7th

If you have been wondering if my silence means we have given up on the scratch cooking project, the answer is no. It’s just that things have been so crazy that we have been eating a lot of eggs, salads and sautéed vegetables. Not terribly exciting to write about.

Robin is still fighting the good fight. She had friends in this weekend and an unexpected visit from a guy she had a thing with way back when. It was good to see her all cuddled up on the couch with him. He is someone famous and I didn’t realize who it was when I first walked in, it was pretty funny. I did a double take. A bunch of her girlfriends who were visiting were upstairs giggling like school girls despite all being in their 50’s!

I am up in San Francisco now, where my good friend Noah is also fighting the good fight and waiting for a liver transplant. We have known each other for 25 years and been through a lot together. After 6 years of fighting Wilson’s disease (House fans will know what it is!), we are at 4^th and goal with 2 minutes left in a tied game, to use a football metaphor. He is at a really amazing hospital, California Pacific Medical Center, and the ICU staff has been incredible. Everyone says he is strong and resilient and he is going to get his liver and day now and get his life back. And that is what I believe, too. In fact, I feel absolutely certain that is how things are meant to be.

Noah’s sister and I have had a number of talks this weekend about organ donation and what an amazing legacy that is – what a gift in to be able to give up to 7 or more people their lives back as your final act of kindness. She is a devout Christian and I am a Buddhist and we both agree that there are fewer greater last deeds than that.

In the meantime, my daughter and her best friend are holding down the scratch cooking fort with crepes! Are my girls amazing or what??? They cleaned the house for me, too!

Here’s the recipe (they e-mailed it to me along with pictures. Have I mentioned yet how great they are???)

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 3 egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 5 tablespoons melted butter

Directions

1. In a large bowl, mix together the milk, egg yolks and vanilla. Stir in the flour, sugar, salt and melted butter until well blended.
2. Heat a crepe pan over medium heat until hot. Coat with vegetable oil or cooking spray. Pour about 1/4 cup of batter into the pan and tip to spread the batter to the edges. When bubbles form on the top and the edges are dry, flip over and cook until lightly browned on the other side and edges are golden. Repeat with remaining batter.
3. Fill crepes with your favorite fruit, cream, caramel or even ice cream or cheese to serve

Scratch Cooking January 31st

I have the sweetest almost 16 year old daughter in the world! She took me out for sushi tonight to say thanks for taking her to get a facial and because she knows I had a difficult weekend. She is a little angel!

She also went to Robin's with me today and, together, the three of us made Robin's great grandmother's sponge cake recipe. Robin's accupuncturist had suggested eating egg yolks and sugar for some energy, and that made her think of her family sponge cake which calls for a dozen eggs. Robin ate some little tastes of batter along the way and it was nice to see her up and walking around this morning since on Saturday she really couldn't get out of bed. By the early afternoon, though, she seemed pretty exhausted and I tucked her into bed and had her listen to a healing meditation on my iPhone.

My daughter helped keep things in check, too. If she saw me getting teary or saying anything too heavy, she would text me to lighten up. Later she told me that she thought I should try to keep on being the cheerleader, that Robin knows what is happening but she doesn't want to say it out loud, so just go with it and stay positive because that makes her feel better. It was good advise and we all had a really nice morning together.

I forgot to take a picture of the cake, but here's the recipe:

INGREDIENTS:

12 eggs

1 3/4  Cups sugar

1/2  cup matzah cake meal (NOT matzah meal)

1/4  cup potato starch

1 large lemon

steel or aluminum angel cake pan – NON STICK will not work.

Pre-heat oven to 350

Separate eggs.

Put whites in one bowl, beat until stiff peaks form, set aside.

Put yolks, sugar and juice from the lemon in another bowl.

Beat this mixture for awhile, until it is creamy and the sugar is integrated with the yolks (should not taste too gritty – a little is OK)

Slowly add the cake meal and potato starch – keep mixing until it’s integrated.

Put the bowl with the eggwhites back on the mixer.  Slowly pour the yolk mixture into the whites, beating on a low speed, until it is all mixed together.  Beat so it is totally blended, but don’t overbeat. 

Pour mixture into the pan.

Bang pan on counter several times to bring any air bubbles to the top.

Cut through the mixture with a knife to eliminate bubbles.

Bang pan again (this is the part of the recipe that has been passed down thru the generations, so DON’T SKIP IT).

Into the oven for 1 hour. 

Everyone’s oven is different.  The cake will rise and turn a lovely brown on top when it’s done.  Stick in a toothpick or something to check for doneness.  It is a very moist cake, so don’t mistake that for underdone.

FOOTNOTE:  This cake is all about the eggs – if you want it to taste as good as it can taste buy GOOD eggs.  Organic, free range, farmer’s market ….

Serve with fresh whipped cream and strawberries.

One more thing that Robin explained to me today: When it's done, turn the cake upside down on a rack and let it cool in the pan for one hour. Run a butter knife around the sides of the pan and remove, then run the knife around the bottom of the pan and remove the bottom. Flip onto a plate and then back over so it is right side up.

This was pretty much the only cooking that took place this weekend which feels a little strange but I also feel like my time was spent where it needed to be the last few days.

Actually, that's not totally true about the cooking, my daughter did make me goat's milk hot chocolate the last two nights. I know she puts cocoa powder, sugar and vanilla in milk and heats it up but I don't know the proportion. All I know is that it tastes really, really good!

Someone I know asked me recently why I am spending so much time helping Robin. She isn't my relative, she has many friends, most of whom have known her a lot longer than I have, and, this person told me, after all the time I will have put in helping her, in the end she will be dead. Essentially she was asking, what is in it for me?

For a second I thought that maybe she had a point. I mean, I have dropped so many things to be there for her and I have felt taken advantage of by her brother. While I was by her side in the hospital, and my daughter was mostly alone during her winter break because of it, he was on a ski trip with his family and refused to come help. While I have missed countless hours of work, when I asked her brother to help convince her it was time for round the clock care, he refused. And when I told him that I thought President's Day weekend might be too late to come see her, he said he couldn't come any sooner, that he has obligations.

But there are so many reasons I want to be doing exactly what I am doing and don't feel put out by it (although, I can still resent the hell out of her brother!). It is clear that, in many ways, Susie (who I could not have gotten through a single day of this without having as my partner in care giving) and I are far more like family to her than her family. I was able to convince her yesterday to have the aide fulltime during the day during the week so she could work on getting her strength back. It is because I have been there with her through all of it and because she trusts me and because I framed it in a way that wasn't scary, she agreed.

And it is also a great honor that despite most of her other friends knowing her much longer than I have, she chose me to help take care of her along with Susie because she saw something in me that was nurturing and comforting and capable.

Susie and I have become very close friends and I am so grateful for that. In fact, I have grown close to so many of Robin's friends from all over the world that I feel certain many of them will be in my life for many years to come. I always envied Robin her huge circle of friends, but I feel now that her circle has become part of my circle.

I have always thought of myself as being someone who panics during a crisis, but I have accessed a strength and calm that I didn't know I possessed. And I have seen those same things in my daughter, maybe even more so than in me.

And probably the greatest gift that Robin has given me is the opportunity to learn what I want for myself - during the uncertain amount of time I have in this life, because the truth is that it is uncertain for all of us, and at its conclusion.

When this ends, I feel confident that I will have gratitude and not regret.

Scratch Cooking January 28

Today it really hit me that my friend is close to the end and that this is the part where I really need to get it together and be there. In retrospect, making her food and taking her to chemo was easy. This is one of the hardest things ever and I am going to tell all of you, I am scared. Scared of being there at the end and not knowing how to help her, scared of my own mortality, scared of my own regrets. I am scared. And sometimes it feels like I am playing the role of the close friend that will be devastated after her friend dies, but today I could feel it so completely how sad it will be after she's gone.

My friend Susie, who is the other member of Robin's A team wrote this to me today. When I read it I knew for sure that the Buddhists are correct, there are enlightened beings among us and sometimes they might even look just like your closest friends.

"I had a dream last night that God was talking through me to Robin.  In the dream Robin was asking me about death.  I told her that her greatest adventure was about to begin, and that heaven is not really a place that you go to see all the other people in your life that had died; rather, it was a journey that she was going to take and it was going to be really exhilarating, enlightening, and utterly fantastic.  I told her that she had nothing to fear and that she should not be afraid to let leave this life.  I said that although it is the end of this life, it was only the beginning of a new future.  I was holding her, stroking her cheek, and urging her to not be afraid…"

She might be embarassed that I am posting it here, but it gave me such incredible comfort and is so beautiful and made it really clear to me that our job is to help our friend on the next step of her journey.

I was thinking that I might make Susie promise to outlive me so that she can be there with me and help me through my journey when the time comes.

It wasn't all doom and gloom today, though. I worked on our website for our foundation - www.blumoonfoundation.org - check it out! The Haiti relief program is really coming together. We found someone to make us a logo for free! He sent a few ideas today and they were GORGEOUS! Such a great guy. He has a fulltime job so he takes on non-profit clients on the side and doesn't charge them. That's some seriously powerful good karma he is accumulating!

And, my daughter is acing her finals with just one left to go. I am so happy for her! It looks like despite all of her worrying, it will be another semester of Straight A's. Not that it matters, because she is smart and wonderful no matter what grades she gets, but it sure makes her feel good!

Yesterday at lunch, my friend Jamie was asking her about the scratch cooking project. She said at first she wasn't really into it, but after a few days, she started to really enjoy the experience. She said now, coming home and smelling bread baking or standing in the kitchen together making dinner makes our home seem more homey. It made me so happy because I have always thought that because it is just the two of us (and the dog, of course), something is missing from our home and that she is missing out. So to hear her say that our home felt more homey because of the scratch cooking reinforced for me how worth doing this has been.

Plus, I won't lie to you, when I read some of your comments, I feel like what I am doing matters and that means the world to me.

My daughter was feeling very bubbly and needing a break from studying so she helped me make dosas. Dosas are a flourless south Indian bread kind of like a crepe. I used the recipe from the Gluten Free Cookbook. Soak 3/4 cup white rice and 1/4 cup of lentils over night in 3 cups of water. Puree it all with the liquid in a food processor and let ferment at room temperature for 24 hours. (I actually left mine more like 48 hours but no harm done.) Add 1/2 teaspoon turmeric, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro. Heat some oil in a small pan until hot enough to make water sizzle. Pour the batter in 1/4 cup at a time and spread until thin like a crepe (ours were a bit thicker like pancakes and they were still good) and cook for a few minutes on each side.

To go with it, I made a quick vegetable curry to go with it. One potato, 1 beet, 2 carrots, a bunch of brocolli, 1/4 cup fresh peas all chopped and sauteed in oil with turmeric, corriander, cumin, ginger and salt.

I started to cry when I was chopping the vegetables. I remembered while cutting the carrots that sometimes Robin and I would talk about what we wanted at our funerals, but in a very abstract way, long before she got sick. Tonight, I was having a hard time remembering what she wanted other than she wanted her friends to celebrate and to laugh together and that I was supposed to read something funny. I always told her that at my funeral, she had to read the suicide note from David Sedaris' Barrel Fever called "The Last You'll Hear from Me" because the first time I read it, I laughed out loud.

So I picked up the phone to call and check on her and started blubbering about how she promised to read that and she had to stay with me. And in a very calm, big-sister voice she said, "okay, but you know, I re-read that recently and I decided it really wouldn't be appropriate." I thought maybe she misheard me and thought that I thought I should read it at her funeral and I said "no, you're supposed to read it at my funeral!" and she said something like, "I know, and I will if that's what you want, but I still think it's inappropriate". And then we both started to laugh. And I told her that I was sorry about last night and that I know that I'm not the one who cries and that I didn't want her to think that meant I didn't care and she said "don't think for a minute that I don't know how much you love me" and that made me feel better.

After I hung up, my friend Isabella called. Her mother just died and she was crying and saying that she wasn't sure she could get through this life without her and I realized something about death and I shared it with her. I think that when people die, parts of them get integrated into you. So when she needs to hear her mother's voice, she only needs to listen to her own voice because it's right there. And after Robin is gone, parts of her will be with and come through all of her friends, and that means part of her will come through me.

Blogger Action Day; Mission Climate Change

Today is blogger action day. And the topic? Climate change. It's funny, since I write about climate a lot, so I want to make today a little different. So let's move from climate blogger action to climate action, shall we? Starting with 9 days from now, October 24th, being climate action day.

More than 3000 events to choose from in 158 countries, come on sign up! There are actions in Europe, Africa, South America, Asia and North America. So let's pick a place and do it! What do you say we all meet in Senegal? How about Paris? Istanbul? Or we could save the carbon emissions and each represent in the place we live.

The idea is to incorporate the number 350 at an iconic place in your community, and then upload a photo of the event to 350.org website. Why 350? That's the level of global carbon emissions we need to get to in order to prevent more than 2 degrees warming in global temperatures. Right now we are at 387 and climbing.

Here’s another thing you can do. Call your Congress critter and your Senators and tell them to quit listening to corporate lobbyists and start listening to scientists – and real scientists, not the ones bought and paid for by Exxon – and pass climate and energy legislation that will get us to the reductions we need. Oh, and while you’re on the phone, tell them this; no offshore drilling, quit subsidizing coal and let the EPA do its darn job and regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act.

Talk to your friends, neighbors, family, colleagues about why you support strong climate and energy legislation with aggressive reduction targets. Talk to them about the money to be saved, and incentives, for energy efficiency. Talk to them about the money to be made in innovation and new technologies. Talk to them about the cost, trillions, of doing nothing about climate change. Talk to them about the number of illnesses caused by coal and exhaust pollution, the same pollutants that cause climate change. Or the emissions from an agricultural system that is making us sick. Talk to them about clean, domestic energy sources that improve our national security and create good American jobs.

Pick something you are going to do differently to waste less, use less and lower your carbon footprint. After you pick that thing, pick another. Then encourage a friend to pick one. Pick another. The more you pick, the more your friend has to pick. Oh, and by the way, your friend also needs to encourage their friends to pick and keep picking the behavioral changes we are all going to make to do our part in the battle to stop catastrophic climate change. See where I’m going with this?

And the next time someone denies that climate change is real, or caused by human activity, ask them this; do you REALLY think you’re smarter than a rocket scientist? Then direct them to the NASA site on climate change.  

Now, if you are still in need of more blogger action, I give you for your reading pleasure some super wonky climate stuff, presented in what I think is a humorous manner, (but maybe I’ve been reading this stuff too long!) check out the CROC Blog (it’s a little inside baseball here but essentially Greenpeace issued a report today saying that a project in Bolivia that the Nature Conservancy has held up as an example of how forest offsets can be successful is actually an example of how they don’t work) and How CBO Budget Scoring Devalues Efficiency – With Puppies!

Happy Blogger Action Day ’09. Let’s get this thing done!

Sisters on the Planet

So last week I attended the Governors’ Global Climate Summit. The point of the conference, in its second year, is to create collaborations among state and provincial governments around the world on climate issues. It was also meant to push the likelihood of an international agreement at Copenhagen in December by creating preliminary international agreements between sub-national governments.

It is heartening to know that so much is happening on emissions reductions, deforestation prevention and renewable energy standards at the local and regional level despite the failure of certain national governments, like ours, to pass national climate policy. And there is much to be excited about in terms of the agreements made at the conference between mayors, governors and premiers from China, the U.S., Indonesia, India, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere.

What was frustrating, though, was the lack of representation of women on many of the panels. Yes, there were women, but they were vastly out numbered by men. Is this a function of who ends up in elected position? Certainly. And yet the women who were there are leaders and warriors on climate and environment. One governor from Brazil, who has done incredible things in her state to stop deforestation, said that she didn’t want her future grandchildren to ask her why, when she had the pen in her hand, she didn’t do everything in her power to stop climate change.

In that spirit, Oxfam America's Sisters on the Planet initiative honored outstanding women for their work to affect climate change policy last Friday at the close of the conference. The honorees included California Senator Barbara Boxer, a true warrior on climate issues and the co-author of a senate bill to tackle climate and energy policy. Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, Linda Adams, was also honored. She is one of the many women responsible for Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly progressive stance on environment and climate change. When they write the story of how a person as unlikely as Arnold Schwarzenegger became a leader on climate issue, that script will have plenty of roles for women!

The woman who was really amazing, though, was Sharon Hanshaw, Executive Director of Coastal Women for Change, in Biloxi, Mississippi. Sharon lost her house, her car and her business – a hair salon – during the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Living in a FEMA trailer, she helped organize local women and gave voice to their concerns over the lack of government support for rebuilding low income communities. Coastal Women for Change trained women, low income residents and people of color to speak out about the recovery process. They also came up with solutions for their communities, like training child care providers and developing disaster preparation. They also became advocates for climate change prevention, recognizing that coastal areas like Biloxi are on the front lines. Sharon may not hold elected office, but what she is doing on climate and environmental justice matters. It matters a lot. And despite her own personal tragedies, she made working on behalf of an entire community her priority.

“Women are the leaders, whether they’re at the head or not,” Sharon has said. And so whether we have the kind of representation in government or on panels that we should, we still have an important, no a critical, role to play in solving the climate crisis. We are often the ones that decide what our families buy, what they eat, and where they live. All of that matters. And so often, women are the conscience of our community, whether it’s a governor recognizing that the decisions she makes today effect future generations or a parent teaching her little one not to waste. And that matters, too.

So here’s to all the sisters on the planet and the sisters on PNN.com. Keep making your voices heard. We are the leaders, whatever our jobs, whatever our titles. And we can lead the world out of this mess!

Clean (and Dirty) Air Cities

There was a question recently about how to find a "clean air" city. With the world's population being over 50% urban, it's an important question. My quick answer is that it's difficult because even if you can afford to live away from coal plants, industry, oil refineries and fast food restaurants (they put out VOCs that cause pollution) and even highways, cars are just about everywhere and they are emitting pollutants into the air.

A study just came out in Environmental Science, however, on greenhouse gas emissions by city. This does and doesn't correlate to clean air, which is also dependent on a host of other factors (non ghg pollutants, air movement, etc.) but it is still enlightening.

The study looked at ten cities; Bangkok, Barcelona, Capetown, Denver, Geneva, London, Los Angeles, New York, Prague and Toronto. The amount of GHG emissions from a city has a lot to do with population density, energy sourcing, industry and transportation, but public and political will is most certainly also a factor.

Denver emitted far more emissions than any other city due in large part to emissions from ground transportation and electricity use. Los Angeles came in second, followed closely by Cape Town and Toronto. Then comes Bangkok and New York followed by Prague and London.

The city with the least GHG emissions? Barcelona by a long shot. The second lowest is Geneva (so Denver can't use cold weather as its excuse).  

So while there are lots of factors in finding a "clean air" city, emissions profiles are certainly one of them.

About Going Green

This site is about how to live a more sustainable, environmentally friendly lifestyle, and how to do it without breaking the bank or suggesting such a drastic change in the way you live that it seems impossible to accomplish. The thing about going green is that it should be a win-win; it should make your life easier, more fulfilling, more pleasurable, healthier and more fun, while taking care of the health and well being of our planet and the millions of folks that share it. It will feature green tips and suggestions, as well as resources for anyone and everyone. I welcome questions, comments and suggestions.

Leslie Berliant