Take it away Becky! (Now just watch her GO!!!)

This past year I have been on a culinary adventure. It began when my husband and I
agreed on some dietary changes to improve our family’s heath. We have never been a
fast food family, we just wanted to simplify our diet, eat less grains and pasta and more
healthy fats, veggies and protein. What do you do when you cut out your go to staple
recipes? What do I make for dinner? It’s time to get creative!

These changes have led me to be open to buying vegetables at the farmers market or
grocery store that I have never cooked before. We have had no overwhelming failures
and lots of delicious success in finding new dishes to replace old standards that weren’t
the best for us. It has actually been fun to bring foreign (to us) produce home and scour
the internet for delicious looking recipes to try.

Kohlrabi in brown butter sauce...Sweet Potato Gratin....So many more we have
devoured...and have completely forgotten the old way we were eating.

I’m also much more adventurous when we dine out. A few weeks back, the hubs and I
were on a date day in Portland. We stopped at the Bijou Cafe (one of our very favorite
breakfast/lunch joints) to grab some lunch. I ordered the Winter Squash Soup and was
immediately transported to memories of adventures on other continents. It was so
delicious I knew I had to eat it again! With every bite I racked my brain for flavor profiles
so I could attempt this for my home eating pleasure.

This is my loose interpretation of the soup I had that day.

Indian Spiced Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients:
1 Butternut Squash (peeled and cubed)
1 Sweet Potato  (peeled and cubed)
1 Onion (chopped)
5 Cloves of Garlic (diced)
1-2 Cups of Chicken Stock  (to your desired consistency)
4 Tablespoons of Butter
1 teaspoon of Garam Masala
1/4 teaspoon of Cardamom
Salt to taste
Cilantro

Directions:

Sauté 1 tablespoon butter, garlic and onions until tender.
Add remaining butter, squash, potatoes and a generous pinch of salt.
Stir and cook for about 5 minutes.
Cover mixture with broth and bring to a simmer.

Put a lid on and keep at simmer until softened or for about 20 minutes.
Puree using your favourite puree method, I chose to use the Vita-mix Santa brought us
for Christmas this year, but there are many options and you are sure to have a favourite of  your own.
Add the cooking liquid in as needed to keep a smooth consistency.
Pour puree into a pot. Add Garam Masala and Cardamom. The measurements are my
suggestion. I’m always heavy handed when it comes to Indian Seasoning.
Adjust soup consistency with stock if desired.

Garnish with Cilantro and enjoy with some crusty bread!

Thank you, My friend Becky for sharing this recipe with me, and taking the time to take the picture and type it all up!

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Ecoholic with its Canadian cover and its US Cover

Over the last week I have been enjoying an amazing book, Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products, and Services by Adria Vasil. It is in my opinion a comprehensive guide to doing your best to protect your family from toxins, and save the planet at the same time. Tons of helpful information on everything. I will be posting my review later this week, and be forewarned that it will get my glowing praise then too. Adria has done an excellent job of guiding the consumer through each aspect of what they buy and why they should know what's in it! Okay, before I give it all away I leave you with a little sample of how helpful her tips are in this article, Save Cash and Trash: Packing Healthier Waste-Free Lunches.

Save Cash and Trash: Packing Healthier Waste-Free Lunches
By Adria Vasil,
Author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services

I won't lie. I loved my juice boxes, pudding cups and classic cream-stuffed snack cakes as a school kid -- but they were all wrapped in plastic destined for the lunchroom garbage can (not to mention totally unhealthy!). Add them all up and a typical student trashes a whopping 70 pounds of lunch packaging every year!
Now, what if instead of reaching for pre-packaged munchies, parents everywhere bought snackables in bulk and placed them in their own reusable containers? By god, we'd have a lunchtime revolution! In fact, if every student packed a zero-waste lunch, we'd save 1.2 billion pounds from landfill a year. You'll also be saving some serious coin (since individually wrapped foods tend to cost more) and coincidentally cutting out many of the not-so-healthy heavily processed ingredients that often come with pre-packaged snacks.

So how do you lighten your lunch load?

• Say goodbye to disposable plastic baggies. Get reusable sandwich-size sacks like Lunch Skins (3greenmoms.com). They're perfect for, yes, sandwiches, as well as chopped up veggies like carrots, peppers and celery.
• Buy yogurt, dried fruit, snackables like pumpkin seeds or even organic cookies in bulk, then pack them in reusable food containers (just not the kind made of clear, shatterproof polycarbonate plastic since those contain hormone disrupting bisphenol A -- the same stuff that made headlines in clear plastic baby bottles).
• Pass on pricey, packaging-heavy drinking boxes and buy juice in large cartons/jugs. Pour a single portion into a polycarbonate-free drink canister like Thermos' Foogo (keeping in mind that a stainless steel container of tap or home-filtered water is way healthier than a shot of sugary, nutritionally dead boxed OJ).
• Pour last night's soups and even stews in an insulated thermos for a homemade meal on the go.
• Don't forget to toss a cloth napkin and, if necessary, washable cutlery into your lunch box.

Keep the lead out of lunchtime
Speaking of lunch boxes, stay away from anything made of vinyl, aka PVC. Back in 2005, California's Center for Environmental Health filed a lawsuit against some big-name makers of soft PVC lunch cases (including Toys"R"Us, Warner Brothers, DC Comics and Time Warner) after testing revealed that their products contained high levels of lead.

Better to go for all-natural cloth or even nylon.You'll find a bunch of alternatives online at sites like www.reusablebags.com (think funky organic and recycled cloth bags, stainless steel containers and compartmentalized bento-box-style Laptop Lunch kits).

Move the message school-wide
Once you've got the knack of trash-free lunches, why not spread the message throughout your child's school? Consider forming a zero-waste lunch committee. If you've got a keen teacher on your side, you might even get students to kick things off with a garbage audit (think garbology 101). That means measuring how much trash goes in bins before and after lunch hour. The mini researchers can put on rubber gloves and note what kind of disposables are taking up the most room.
Raise cash for trash
Whatever you do, don't let any disposables that you and other parents might still use end up in landfill. Talk to your kid's school about saving them up and sending them packin' to be made into purses and pencil cases! Once you've collected a bunch of branded drink pouches, candy/cookie/energy bar wrappers, chip bags and yogurt cups, ship them off to TerraCycle and the upcycling company will give you 2¢ to 5¢ per package for your trouble (terracycle.net). Call it a cash-for-trash fundraiser and you'll be garbage-free in no time!

©2009 Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services

Author Bio
Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services, is a best-selling author and journalist for Canada's NOW, where she has been writing the "Ecoholic" column for five years. She lives in Toronto.

For more information please visit www.ecoholicnation.com

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Child Soldiers

By Paul Harris

The element of The Secret Keeper that many readers find most disturbing is
the child soldiers. Tragically they are not a fictional invention. The use
of child soldiers was a key feature of the civil war in Sierra Leone, as it
was in many conflicts in West Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. The
problem isn’t limited to that corner of the world during that time,
however. When I was emailing with Bethany about a possible topic she
mentioned that she had done research into the use of child soldiers by the
Colombian narco-guerrillas known as FARC. So neither Sierra Leone, nor
Africa, has a monopoly on using children as a weapon of war.

I do not pretend to know how to solve the problem of child soldiers. I wish
I did and I wish The Secret Keeper held the answers. But in the book I
sought only to reflect my own experience and my own emotional response to
encounters with them. That usually came from meetings at roadblocks, often
manned by rag tag soldiers, some of whom were barely taller than the rifles
they carried. To get past them was usually a careful negotiation, complete
with bribes of cigarettes, bread and booze. Alcohol, much demanded by the
soldiers, always made a return trip more unnerving as by then those manning
the roadblocks would be drunk. That they should have sought escape in
alcohol should be no surprise. They were caught up in wars not of their own
making. Their parents were likely dead. The rebels in Sierra Leone were so
brutal that they even stooped to forcing children to kill members of their
own families. The traumatised children then had no choice but to then join
their ranks.

The government side, and the various rag tag militia that lurked everywhere
were better than that. But not by too much. It was all brutish and nasty.
You prayed never to run into a rebel roadblock (I never did, thank God).
But government ones could be terrifying too, with guns pointed through
windows and, behind the trigger, the drugged-up stares of ten-year-olds.
But I do remember that these boys and youths, despite the horrors of their
situation, would sometimes respond to a simple smile and a joke. Just in
the same way any child or youth would. They would grin back and laugh at
some gesture or friendly shake of the hand. It was a reminder that no
matter what they had seen or done or endured, these children and teenage
boys were still somehow just that: children and boys. If a reader could
look through some of the horrors that The Secret Keeper describes and still
see those truths, then writing the book would have been more than worth it.

Chat with the Author: Paul Harris, The Secret Keeper

He won’t be keeping too many secrets today!

Paul Harris has agreed to “lurk” around Dreadlock Girl today and respond to questions or comments about this guest post and his new book, The Secret Keeper. I can’t wait to ask some myself. I hope you will take this opportunity as well!

Paul Harris will respond to comments/questions on both Dreadlock Girl and Dreadlock Girl Reads . If you want to follow the conversation along, make sure to check them both out!

Read more about The Secret Keeper:
Dreadlock Girl’s book review of The Secret Keeper
The official book website: The Secret Keeper

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