bestantioxidant’s blog

Oh goodness, I'm reading over several pasta sauce recipes right now and my mouth is watering viciously. Pesto sauce, ragu sauce, and bolognese, the stuff makes me want to go nuts.

I've been cooking more and more recently. On monday I made ratatouille. It was a simple recipe and ended up basically being turkey, chopped veggies, and tomato paste all mixed together. It didn't particularly taste good, though it made me realize the things I could do by creating sauces to go along with the usual grilled chicken or pork. And then I began thinking about Italian food...

I don't LOVE Italian like many epicureans do, but I'll admit, Olive Garden was a favorite Friday night event as a child. Breadsticks dipped in Alfredo sauce, so good, too bad that might just be the least healthy food combo on the planet.

So the Italians have some great sauces. My dilemna is, what do I pour these sauces over? Chicken? That's the best I can come up with right now. I'm thinking, make a batch of awesome sauce, and then just pour it over everything I cook the rest of the week, yes it adds calories, a good deal of fat, and most likely some extra unwanted carbs, but it's all in the joy of cooking, and I feel the more I cook, the more concious I become of the foods I'm eating and how to cook healthier. Thus, the healthier I become!

By the way, if you haven't already been to the omega 3 capsules website or the one a day health blog, they're both great examples of quick, easy, blogging.

I originally intended this blog to have a certain style, a certain subject matter, a certain tone.

I find all three slipping in today's post as I rush to get words to press. I've been busy lately, and taking the time during work to describe the wonderful surroundings in the nature of my memory.

As it happens, my memory's almost out of nature!

Well, not entirely, but right now my mind is so absorbed in the 18 tasks I'm trying to accomplish simultaneously, that the quality of the material I'm writing isn't always my A-game.

Funny enough, yesterday I didn't have as many tasks to swallow at once, and I wrote a rather lovely beginning to a subtle short story about a boy trying to catch sea turtles. I'd planned to piece together the short story over the next week, but I'll have to put that on hold as well. It's type, type, type as fast as I can, stream of conciousness as the cliche goes, just to make the deadline, but I do believe I will accomplish my goals, and possibly even in the future get back to writing about nature and the rest.

Until then, enjoy this health blog. It has a wonderful post about the paleo diet, or not exactly the paleo diet, but something similar called the primal blueprint.

I drove south through the meat of Georgia, hours west of Atlanta where everything grows and nobody lives. The humidity cakes the leaves, the grass, my shins, and my glasses, and the soggy pools of sweat widen out across my shirt from my armpits as I claw further into the canopied thickness.

I house sits next to a creek far back along the narrow gravel road. The foliage is wild up until a gazebo thirty yards from the house. From here it slowly forms into an arch, straight and well groomed. At the end stands a wide, yawning porch. The porch is eaten through by mites, the decay smells sweet, and the gingerbread along the stair rails is painted pink, the whole house reminds me of cake.

A mother skunk and her brood waddle along the creek behind the house. The skunks are unafraid of the children playing by the fountain swing nearby, I wonder of they have been descented and are kept on the grounds to maintain a sort of natural charm. Nothing smells of musk.

The house lord has informed me the water from the creek is safe to drink right from the hand, yet the rushing gilly stirs up mud, and is layered with water skeeters and lillypads. A man with washboard abs kneels down near me to drink from the creek and tells me his uncle wasn't lying.

I have come to Georgia to buy vitamin pills and omega 3 supplements, but I abandoned my task over a week ago. I will spend a few more days at the house and head south toward Florida and the swampland of the western panhandle.

Someone has built a castle in a field outside Portland. It is made of plywood, but painted to look like stone. The castle has no strategic position, it fortifies nothing, it looks out across what used to be a football field. Mothers cart their babies in eco-strollers past the foot of the drawbridge and into a wooded park at the far edge of the field.

Someone or some perhaps a hold team of park service someones decided to built a fake moat to match the fake castle, but the effort had been abandoned and now there is a ditch overgrown with crabgrass extending out from one side of the drawbridge.

This entire field will be mudded over and trampled down come fall when the renaissance fair returns to town. A whole fake world will honor the fake castle, a fake king with his fake archers and even fake knights riding real horses. Park services will make enough money for the year and even decide to finish off the moat, perhaps digging it another twenty yards for the year after.

The trees lean toward the edge of the field and far beyond the cityscape of Portland crests a barren hill.

Find this orthorexia post for a bit of recent health news, and then go to people find to....well, to find people.

Death Valley contains the dunes of the Sahara. It contains the brush of Southern Mexico, and the craters of Wyoming. It contains the canyons of Arizona, and the salt flats of Utah. Death Valley is bigger than the state of Connecticut, and twice as grand.

Entering Death Valley from Nevada, one drives the twisty road 70 miles through the trench of a narrow canyon. The red-gray igneous walls stretch up 800 feet into pikes and jags. Water has sallowed out the canyon floor and burrowed the rocky sides into oblong welts and thin caves. Cracks chase the face vertically, thick enough for a fingers, a hand, but not an arm. Sound echoes small. A shout is returned four times, but does not travel further than the next bend.

The canyon gently slopes, an easy walk in for as many miles as a day makes at a leisurely pace. Subaru's and Outbacks and mountain bikes cruise against the foot traffic. Benevolent campers will tow back groups of hikers in their four wheel drives. I saw a thick-set man driving eight coeds back down the canyon. Two were stretched out across the roof. The SUV was barely outpacing a jog, but the desert ride wasn't for necessity but fun for the eight girls.

Dust seeps into the shoes, then the fingernails, then the snot and the arm hair, then finally the gums and the eyes. Dried sweat cakes up the dust around the ears and the neck and my hair was crackly and hardened by the end of day.

I must return to Death Valley soon, perhaps in the summer when the heat justifies the name.

My two links for this week are how to deal with stress and primal nutrition. Thanks for stopping by.

There are places in the Sahara where nothing grows. The land is an ocean of shifting sand with a deep water table.

The American desert is not at all like the Sahara.  It is alive in every inch, even at the driest points.

Heading out from Texas, highway 10 cuts across New Mexico, across Arizona, and runs through the dunes of western California and finally into San Diego. This is some of the driest American terrain, cracked and scorched and windy. The terrain is so windy, the lands are spotted with white pillars--windmills-- placed by oil companies to harness another power source so as to appear environmentally friendly to the public.

The dust is thick, but it is caught up by millions of cacti, scrub brush, and prickly pear. Pools coelesce in the dips of the flat land, and every stretch of ply is ringed by sharp, snowless mountains. Away from the highway, along the cattle roads and access routes to mining facilities, the remains of snakes and lizards lie splattered against the asphalt. Cattle guards span small bridges every few miles, and unrolled clusters of hay have been sprinkled about near fences chasing along the highway.

The real living things on the desert are the birds. They are wide and black crows and hawks, unseen in cities, these things remind me more of their neolithic ancestors than anything you'd want to sprinkle bread crumbs to. The birds are unafraid and will stare down a car, only hopping aside in the final moments after they disappear below my windshield and out of my sight line but before I crush them.

These small cattle roads are some of my favorite places.

And without breaking stride, here are the blogs I'm linking to this month. The Damage Control Master Formula is a good place to look into if you like vitamins online. And who doesn't?

When I was young, my mother would drive my sister and I back and forth between Kansas and Texas. Straight south through Oklahoma, the cars are all old in Oklahoma, and back then the licence plates still read, "We're OK!" Those trips cultivated my love of the road, not that there was much to see. The most unusual thing was the abandoned amusement park half a day south of Oklahoma City. Rusty girders, and train tracks climbing into nowhere and lopsided tea cups littered a half mile of highway. Most of the signs had blown away or decayed, but one of the coasters still had a sign up for a nickel a ride which made me realize this place had been abandoned long before the modern world was built up around it. I asked my mother several times if we could stop by the carnival graveyard to pick around, but she seemed to believe the place was dangerous. It probably was.

Further south, we passed 'grasshoppers.' Grasshoppers are the oscillating oil pumps that spot up Northern Texas. nothing but dust and grasshoppers and an occasional rusty outlet, I guess for the business of keeping the grasshoppers moving. The circular motion of the pump was like a carnival ride at half speed, and wanted to climb one desperately. My mother said no to this as well, she seemed to believe everything in the world was dangerous. This wasn't so, but most everything I took an interest in between Kansas and Texas was a forbidden beauty, earth and steel I still feel today.