Rebuild from Depression Blog

He was wearing a baby blue bonnet that looked a lot like grandma's shower cap. On either side of his nose a nurse had written "Yes" with a blue pen.

The gown was made of paper and the undergarment like gauze.

"Do you want me to write 'No' on you anywhere?"

We giggled in pre-op and then he got wheeled away.

While I sat during the three-and-a-half hour procedure, the room was quiet. People would get called away and come out looking frightened. One woman told me that her husband has been coming for surgeries for over twenty years. This would be one of his last and the surgery was to keep him comfortable.

Though I sat worried, Sander's sinuses were filled with benign polyps. The surgery may change his life in a big way but was not necessary to save it. I think I was the only one there in such a good circumstance. And as it turns out, Sander doesn't even really need the pain medication we stocked to get him through the next two weeks.

Since we've returned home, our life has been on hold, but Sander should come out of this better than ever. Minimally, he can smell his food again. And speaking of food, my mom has been working on some food videos for this site. Expect them to begin in about a week.

You've seen the bobcat before - he nearly walked into my house two months ago. He purred and acted like he wanted to be a pet. I closed the door.

This blog started with a post about a batch of baby chicks. There were twenty nine months ago and today there are six.

Researchers tell us that when we suffer from depression, laughter might actually help alleviate our mental state. When I struggled with depression postpartum, one of my doctors recommended that I watch funny movies.

I remember feeling angry. I thought to myself, "if it's so darned easy I expect I would be feeling better right now."

I was right and I was wrong.

There is nothing easy about recovering from depression. This website is about nutrients and depression, but nutrients are one often missing part of a complex picture. Laughter is another.

Jennifer nominates The Beatles in our Rock Group and Depression Buster? Contest. We are looking for foods high in depression-fighting nutrients that are also rock groups. Jennifer says:

What about Beetles, as in The Beatles, and beetles as in bugs? They have got to be loaded with vitamins, like all insects. I was thinking specifically of real beetles, like Japanese beetles.

We strive to eat locally here in California Hot Springs. Up to this point, our honey has come from about 35 miles away, in the San Joaquin Valley, near all of the orange groves. We don't produce honey ourselves so we never imagined that we might end up with some on our own property.

In fact, it's better than just honey. Back in March, author David George Gordon nominated the larval honey bee as a nutrient-dense depression-fighting food. They are high in vitamins A and D. You can't buy larval bees just anywhere. I have yet to see them stocked in a grocery store, so I never imagined that we could have them for dinner. Until now, of course.

September is the Eat Local Challenge sponsored by the San Francisco-area Locavores and tracked at the Eat Local Challenge Blog.

A month-long eat local challenge is a big effort for most people. That's why I've always felt like a bit of a cheater when these challenges come along. Most of our food is local anyway. It's just how we've been living here before the Eat Local Movement had a name or made national news. Our diet is not 100% local but it can be without a lot of effort. We are in the foothills above the most prolific agricultural region in the world. What we don't grow at home or buy from a local cattle rancher, we can find pretty easily.

So I thought it was time to step things up a bit. This year for 2007 Eat Local Challenge in September:

My own mom is part of a dying breed of cooks. Growing up, she lived with her grandmother every summer. Nana was an exceptional gourmet herself and taught my mom everything she knew. She taught my mom how to skim cream off the milk and turn it into ice cream, how to can fruit and turn the canned fruit into great winter time salads, how to make angel food cake from scratch with a wire whip, and how to improve anything at all with a great sauce.

Great Skill

Every time I get the wild idea to make something "different," I consult my mom and she always seems to have answers. When I got married, for instance, we had just been on a research trip in Europe and I suggested that I wanted a wedding cake "like the cakes in European coffee houses." You can find those cakes in bakeries now (though they still may not use all butter for their butter cream), but at the time, they were no where to be found.

"No problem," said my mom.

Salads are a staple in this house. They are simple, versatile, and allow a wide range of depression buster food toppings on a bed of fresh raw produce. My mom has already contributed to this site information on selecting greens, handling greens, and on making salad dressing.

In this video she describes how she makes a base for any salad -- how to prepare the greens and how to flavor them so that they are ready for any topping.

To view the video, click the "play" button in the image below or watch it directly on YouTube here.

In the video, she demonstrates how she has bagged lettuce to save for later in the week. This technique works best for romaine. For leaf lettuces, store the whole leaf and tear it up when you are preparing the salad. Leaf lettuce tends to wilt pretty quickly and not store well.

Included here are tips and tricks from my mom, Jeanie Rose, on handling and mincing garlic. I thought I knew all of her garlic tricks until I watched the video and learned even more.

Click on the play button in the image below to watch the video or visit the video directly at YouTube (Minced Garlic)

Everyone struggles to improve their diets and sometimes the task seems so monumental that it is not even worth the effort. But small changes can have an impact. A study of breastfeeding moms from about ten years ago makes that point.

This is a favorite salad around this house. It is a single entree meal with a large base of fresh raw vegetables, topped with an official depression buster food -- beef. This particular beef comes from a steer featured on this site back in February in "I Met My Meat."

I apologize for the over-exposed video, but I guarantee that the salad itself was anything but washed out. Here's what mom has to say about enchilada salads:

We don't eat a lot of grain and a grain mill is probably a real extravagance in that context. But for well over a year I have been talking about purchasing one and finally bit the bullet and purchased an attachment for our KitchenAid mixer.

Two things tugged at me over those months:

I see these supplements in health food stores all the time. In one bottle you get three types of essential fatty acids. We have been hearing about how important Omega-3 fatty acids are and since Omega-6 and Omega-9 fatty acids are essential too, these products look the product manufacturers' gift to your health. They are not.

I own the last remaining gallon of milk recalled in the September 2006 recall of Organic Pastures milk. At least I can't imagine that anyone else has kept a gallon this long.

We were part of a buyer's club and put in an extra large order the week before the recall and, quite by accident, I ended up with about eight gallons in the refrigerator. We had consumed a few before the recall. When the recall was announced I wondered what we should do with the milk. You know, you are supposed to pour it down the drain and get your money back.

I wondered what to do.

My mom said, "Well, I've been drinking it and I'm going to keep drinking it."

So we all did.

In fact, we went to the press conference announcing the end of the recall and offered some milk to reporters. That is one way to get your picture taken.

This winter as I cleaned the freezer, I found a gallon of milk dated in mid September of 2006 -- definitely a gallon of the recalled milk. I got the bright idea to auction it on eBay and that has been my plan until now.

Pictured: Aaron McAfee, Operations Manager at Organic Pastures, verifying the milk

On the way home from preschool the other day, five-year-old Frederick was recounting his dream for the night. As he described the dream, I thought "I must write about this on the site."

What I thought to myself as he told me the story was "Good news. His B-6 status is good."

Your regular doctor will not have this information but pioneer in mental health and food nutrients, Carl Pfieffer, describes in his book Nutrition and Mental Illness that in the presence of a B-6 deficiency you do not recall your dreams at night.

How many times have you said, "I don't have dreams"?

You likely do have dreams but just don't remember them.

Do you have a favorite liver recipe? Post it here or post it on your blog and include a trackback to this site so we can all read it.

We are experimenting all the time with liver. Mom's latest creation is captured on video. This is one of our longer videos because she cooks the liver entirely on camera and makes gravy. In under ten minutes, she puts together the liver and gravy.

She learned this flash frying technique from a raw foodist who will be surprised by her quote on the video "no one really likes liver raw." Some people do, but mom is not one of them.

In honor of this week's 50th Anniversary of the La Leche League at their conference in Chicago, I have found an interesting article on Omega-3 fatty acids, trans fats, and the cord blood of newborn babies. Pregnant or not, woman or not, a study of the cord blood of newborn babies is important for our health.

We should all be packing our lunch more with our own fresh food. I often pack salads because they are so easy to throw together. Last week I packed something even easier - some broccoli pieces and a clam dip. That very dip in the picture below was made by my mother in a video that will soon make it to this site. I added leftover clams to make it a power-clam dip. Clams are high in iron as you know if you have read the free e-book Rebuild Your Iron.

But what I wanted to point out is the cool tiffin I used to pack the lunch. This "lunch box" is available at To-Go Ware. It has two compartments that worked well for my broccoli and my dip. They are separated by a small stainless steel plate that would be handy for other types of lunches. It's a nice lunch box. No one else I know has one which also makes it cool (and it might make me ever-so-slightly cool, but I won't get my hopes up too much).

Healthy brains need Omega-3 fatty acids research continues to tell us. Omega-3 fatty acids can not only alleviate our depression, improve our mental acuity, but also help us avoid sliding into dementia or developing Alzheimer Disease as we age.

An April 2007 editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition calls longer-term studies on the effectiveness of Omega-3 fatty acids in light of the fairly compelling evidence that fatty acid intake improves cognitive functioning.

The plums are ripe and their vitamins and antioxidants are waiting for me when I return from the La Leche League Conference. I've heard some discussion of a plum cobbler.

This is a staple food around here all year round -- the composed salad. It always looks different depending on what we have around. Some use less lettuce and more of whatever other vegetable we have around. Each usually contains some sort of protein food. In this case, mom uses an egg salad to top the greens. In the video, she refers to previous videos on this website on handling greens and minced garlic.

To view the video, click the "play" button in the image below or go directly to YouTube to view composed salads.

Sometimes it is a really good idea to be hooked up with some good probiotics. Probiotics are beneficial bacteria that help keep your digestive system healthy. You can find them in health food stores and they are generally quite expensive. You can also take advantage of Mother Nature's probiotics - fermented and cultured foods.

I eat fermented foods or drinks nearly everyday as health insurance (home ferments, not the fermented beverages popular in college dorms). I expect that insurance helped keep me from getting extra ill this week.

An old cattle fence in the Sequoia National Monument. Cattle still graze in this area.

I try real hard not to be paranoid about the food that I am eating. It seems that we have constant outbreaks of illness from foodborn pathogens in this country. We get messages about animal foods with blood and pus from animal rights groups like Peta. And then there is the food produced in a petrie dish at biotech firms.

"Genetically modified foods will feed the world," says the GM industry.

"Biotech firms are creating FrankenFoods," say the opponents.

I think it's a great goal to feed the world. But the funny thing about food is that, in addition to being fun to eat and at the center of most of our social events, it is absolutely our only source of nutrients. That is what food is. Genetic modification of foods may be changing the very essence of food -- its nutrient profile -- and turning something nourishing into something potentially deadly.

When we are short on time and long on vegetables, this is a pretty darned good way to do it.

This is a pretty long video but comes in three parts:

(1) Mom describes how she marinades vegetables in olive oil and crushed garlic for a few hours or so, turning a couple of times in the soaking process to move the oil around. The vegetables will absorb the flavor from the oil and garlic as they soak.

(2) Mom grills the vegetables on the stove top but she also suggests baking in the oven. After grilling, mom adds some Romano cheese to the top and shows how it looks as a composed dinner plate.

(3) Mom uses the vegetables in a composed salad.

To watch the video, click on the "play button" in the image below or visit YouTube directly here: grilled vegetables.