Summer Beans & Greens

Food A Love Story

Summer Beans & Greens




I find it peaceful to write and so was relieved to finally have the time to write on Ayurveda & the Summer Season and get it published to my Blog. It is full of tips for maintaining balance in what is turning it out to be an especially hot season and you can find it here on the Seasons page.

Meanwhile, I had a great lunch yesterday that I also want to share, by way of a little explanation:

In both Spring and Summer I focus on beans and greens. The difference is that in the Spring meals are hot and spicy, whereas in Summer we enjoy cooling vegetables and fresh seasonings that aid digestion without heating the body ~ like mint, cilantro, dill and fennel.



So, with a few tweaks, this recipe for Tofu with Snap Peas from Whole Living magazine (more and more a great resource for vegetarian meals) is ideal for summer. I simply replaced the red pepper with fresh, chopped mint from the garden, sprinkled the whole dish with the juice of one lime and garnished with a copious dose of chopped cilantro.



Cilantro is so incredibly cleansing, balancing and cooling that we add to almost everything in our home. We are fortunate because we were just given a generous handful of cilantro seeds, aka Coriander, for our garden. We use a lot of coriander in our cooking, grinding the seeds from whole, so we are familiar with these beautiful balloon-shaped gems. Still, holding this gift in my hands, I couldn’t help but marvel at the intelligence, the deliciousness, the potency and the medicine within.



We have a perfect spot for them – a place where we were growing sunflowers, until someone thought they were weeds and yanked the newborns right out. It was the next day before I noticed they were gone. I cried on the spot. It was as if something in me had been ripped out and tossed away. Considered useless, ugly, a waste.



Silly, I know, but I had nurtured the sunflower plants from seeds, soaking them first, transferring them to the ground, watching over and cultivating them carefully, protecting them from our neighborhood’s stalking ravens, researching their power to purify soil, and then writing a whole blog about it…




But Coriander seeds blossoming into Cilantro will fill the gaping emptiness and restore our garden to whole. And then one day before summer is over we’ll be able to make Tofu and Snap Peas with our own home-grown Cilantro.




Nature’s beautiful cycles of renewal is the reminder I need today that we, too, are nature and our powers of regeneration are every bit as great.

Hope you are enjoying your summer.

Namaste ~

Laura Plumb

Protective Strategies - Cesium 137 (Radiation Education)

Natural Cesium 137 Protective Strategies

By Charlotte Tenney,

April 2011

By the time this is published, we will know much more about how much radiation has been released from the Japanese reactors and where it has drifted. My email box is filled with messages either asking or suggesting ways to prepare and deal with radio-active fallout. At my chiropractic appointment yesterday, I was advised in increase my iodine intake and offered iodine tablets. It was incredible that he was willing to part with them, since they have become a famously scarce commodity in the marketplace. To say the least, this health threat is one that has grabbed our collective attention.

I was compelled to do some research in order to understand the issue and formulate a plan. First let’s define the problem. The kind of radiation that will be drifting our West Coast way is called Cesium-137. All of the radio-active isotopes work in the body by bonding with a mineral/metal receptor site. This one does NOT bond with the iodine receptors and disrupt the thyroid function. Instead, it docks on the potassium receptors and affects primarily the muscles. In addition to blocking the potassium receptors, it emits gamma rays that act as powerful oxidizers that mutate DNA in ways that can become cancerous. The way it gets into our system is through our breath and our food. Since it is neutralized by water, we don’t generally get it in our water supply.

Working from that overly simplified description, here are the things that I have found are recommended by such sites as Mayo Clinic, Argonne National Laboratories and a large number of natural health sites. I am indebted to Ingrid Naiman’s newsletter (ingridnaiman.com/subscription_lists) and the Healing Cancer Naturally organization (www.naturopathichealth.net ) for their excellent research and analysis. They had carefully thought out and comprehensive strategies to protect your health..