Thursday, January 12, 2023

Pears for Spares

 




The nutrition doctor, Joel Fuhrman, advocates three to six fruit servings a day. Most of us love fruit desserts, but we can enjoy the fruit without adding sugar, whipped cream, and ice cream. 

Fruits have plenty of sugar, but it is locked up in fiber. Some juicers save the sugary juice and separate out the fiber. However, fiber tamps down the sugar rush and also provides for digestion. Fast-acting sweet products give us a quick rush and then a face-plant when insulin provides the sugar blues. That is also a reason why people eat all day. The repetition of small this-won't-hurt snacks keep the digestive systems ready to eat more. 

I have certainly experienced craving and answered it with fast-acting, delicious food. Fuhrman suggests high-volume low-calorie food to satisfy the rush to the kitchen. Apple, oranges, pears, and pineapple are perfect for replacing the crave with a healthy, loaded with nutrition, complete fruit.

Pears start out hard and not very tasty. I put the first ones out on the western kitchen window. Day 1 - eating cork. Day 2 - better. Day 3 - juicy, sweet, and fun to eat. 

I usually eat several large apples at a time, four a day, or a bowl of oranges. I did not like pineapple straight, so I now trim the triceratops armor off and pop the juicy parts into the vegetable dish. No icks aloud! Some of you love Hawaiian pizza - cheese, pineapple, bread. Each slice is two portions of fat, salt, and white bread - tons of fun.

Fruit can be very good with vegetables. Because fresh blueberries are good for blood pressure but seductive in seeking out muffins, syrup, and pie, I dump them in with the vegetables too, but not at the same time (so far). 

Here is a simple rule - the most nutritious foods are also the most filling ones. The food promoted and sold is the most fattening, sweet, and salted and the least nutritious. McDonalds quarter pounder with cheese and bacon. I rest my case.

Giving up the super-fattening combinations is a bit tough at first but not as difficult as surgery, medicine with bad side-effects.

These are my daily requirements as I head down below 190 and perhaps land at 180:

Must - chopped greens, whether kale, spinach, turnip, or collards. Almost zero calories and easily blended with the vegetables.

Must - low salt beans, the best being chickpeas, or garbanzo when they are out. Busch beans are four times saltier than WM organic ones, and so are other enhanced, bacony beans. Chickpeas and garbanzos are loaded with protein, fiber, and nutrition, so they calm the craving for the wrong foods.

Yes! and good for us all - Onions/peppers - they add flavor and are anti-cancer.

Yes! taste good and not fattening - sweet peas.

Yes! blueberries are delicious with vegetables and reduce blood pressure.

Must - walnuts remove dangerous cholesterol. A handful a day has many benefits. Remove the ice cream from under the nuts or just make that dessert every so often. Almonds are a good substitute if walnuts cause allergies.

Learn to love - broccoli is actually a flower but it is also an anti-cancer and wondrous super-food. I like the tinier lumps of this vegetable, the same with cauliflower in the same super-food category.

Some vendors are ricing things like cauliflower and also flavoring them with salt and seasoning, doubling the price. I say "Man up and chew it to a liquid before the teeth are gone!"


 

Miracles by Theophilus (God-loving) Stork - From the Lutheran Library

 

 Link here

“There has always been a secret prejudice against miracles…there is still a reluctance in many minds to admit these departures from the order of nature predicated in miracles… A modified form of this feeling may be seen in many honest believers in their disposition to overlook the miracles as the wonders of a distant age, answering an important purpose in the first introduction of Christianity, but of little use now as evidences of their religion.


But those who unite in this fervid exclamation forget that miracles are fundamental to the very existence of objective Christianity. And although in their spiritual apprehension and experience of its blessed truths, they may not feel the necessity of miracles to confirm their faith in religion, still they are, in fact, the ultimate basis upon which the whole system rests."

The rationalists of the National Council of Churches have reduced the miracles to primitive minds and faulty Scriptures. Their miracle is reducing the population of believers at an astonishing rate, with the "conservative" sects following in their wake. "What could be more full of meaning?- for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt." Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 8.


Rain and Snow Predicted for Today

 


Last night we had a heavy rain and a bit of hail. Today we have rain and snow predicted. My computer has an icon for weather, so I saw it claiming "temp plummeting" when that only meant a few degrees colder.

This kind of weather is my hardest working time for the garden - not that I lift a finger. I look out the window or sit on the porch to watch the garden green up. I know that hundreds of hundreds of bulbs will bloom in the near future. They extended their roots soon after planting in the fall. Now they have reached up to burst into bloom when the bulbs, more reliable than the meteorologist, sense it is time to flower.

Daffodils and grape hyacinths flourish and bloom a long time, increasing their numbers a little bit each year. The bulb catalogs for 2024 arrive with the advent of the blooms. They know many of us are too weak to resist buying just a few more bulbs for the next spring - to remind us of the currently blooming flowers. The murmuring breezes say, "Don't you want your neighbors to fall over in a faint, enjoying more of the colorful, exotic, bizarre, and graceful bulbs?"

One member said about our congregation, "Just a few here and there." I responded, "It only takes one here and there, over time. And we have no way of knowing." One printed, full-color book was recently delivered to an individual 9,000 miles away. Others travel over the Internet, thanks to ones and zeroes, PDFs that mimic an entire book yet arrive for free. There is no way to measure them.

 Matthias Loy is now easily accessed at the Lutheran Library Publishing Ministry.


Alec Satin has put together over 300 books online with more than 70 of them in print form - and low in cost for the print versions. Many of them are rare, fragile, and very difficult to find. A good way to start is at lutheranlibrary.org

That site with no ads outranks the LCMS version, with their small collection costing $300. Oh my! The LCMS has created a free site for various books and essays. Their "ultimate package" of printed books is valued at $539! - for nine books!

Readers have told me that they never heard of the efficacy of the Word of God until they began reading materials from this blog. If the leaders would learn and teach Isaiah 55, and make it a priority, they could flourish. 

 Luther always taught the efficacy of the Word and cited God's Creation by the Word, so why do Luther-ans (sic) ignore Biblical efficacy and Creation?