2011 - Page 16 of 27 - Sarah Wilson

lentils: how to really eat them

April 16, 2018May 24, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

A few posts back Julie Cowdroy wrote about the Below the Line campaign – a program in May that sees well-fed westerners live on $2 a day to experience what it’s like for the world’s poorest. And to raise $$. I promised to give it a crack and did so for a day. As, it seems, with most people who did it, I resorted to lentils.

Lentils are cheap. And Dr Weston A Price considers the little buggers the most nutritious of all legumes – high in minerals and they help assimilate protein and iron absorption. But they can be bland and horrible and really crook on the gut. If you don’t play right.

Here’s some tricks for eating them.

Just mine. It’s not a comprehensive list.

1. Add red lentils to soups and casseroles and curries…

for extra bulk and fibre and protein. A cheap way to spread out a meal. Simply rince a handful and toss in 15-20 minutes before the dish is cooked. They disintegrate and you’ll barely know they’re there.

2. Soak your green and brown lentils a few hours.

Most recipes will say you don’t need to at all because they’re quite low on phytic acid. Soak in warm water with a bit of lemon juice. Seven hours is good.

3. I make dahl…
by boiling soaked brown lentils (1.5 cups) in water to cover, adding a tsp of turmeric (a great anti-inflammatory), pepper and garlic. I simmer for an hour (covered) and then whisk the lentils til creamy. In a pan I saute cumin seeds and 2 small hot chillies in butter (or ghee) and then fold that through the lentils with some coriander.

4. I sprout lentils.

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we’re bone-heavy creatures…keep close

October 23, 2018May 23, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

I wrote yesterday in Sunday Life about going retro with my work habits…that I write out things longhand and that I’ve taken to using index cards to map out ideas before sitting down to a computer screen. It gets me closer to my creativity and slows things down to the pace at which I create and think.

So happens I was reading David Malouf’s essay The Happy Life in The Quarterly Essay yesterday. He writes longhand, too. Then types. And he discusses – beautifully – the idea that part of our unease, our contemporary unhappiness, comes from having so much our life occurring at a speed that our bodies are not aligned with.

He writes that it is integral to our happiness to be curious and to delve and to investigate. And that our bodies are our reference point, to determine direction.

“We start always from the body, and relate all thing back to it.”

And indeed everything about our bodies are in relation – think of Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci’s figure that shows every bit of our body is proportional and symmetrical.)

But life goes so fast now.

“These days we can travel around the globe at hundreds of kilometres an hour and project ourselves into space at several times that speed; but in some part of ourselves we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth, lumbering along as our great-grandfathers did…at four hundred paces, and tiring.”

Yes, and tiring.

The question, he writes, is:

“whether emotionally, psychologically, we can feel at home in a world whose dimensions so largely exceed …what our bodies can keep in view.”

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I’m learning to listen to my gut

November 6, 2018May 19, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

This keeps coming up as a theme: listening to your gut. I remember a few years ago being told to do this, to trust your instinct, which somehow resides in your stomach. And I tell you I had no visceral sense AT ALL what it meant. My gut? Nothing was coming from there. I got nervous feelings, butterflies etc, but had no idea how to translate these feelings to my cerebral side.

I saw this on Big Think this morning – James Marsh, who made Man on Wire, talking about it.

where women go wrong: they give away their feminine power

November 6, 2018May 18, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psych and author of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters came out with some statement this week that men typically lie upwards and women typically lie downwards.

He uses this argument to then highlight a point I think he’s rather proud of: the one thing that women don’t realise about their feminine power…

They actually have more of it than they realise.

He says:

It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men.

But he argues:

Men pretend that they make more money, are taller and have had more sexual partners. In contrast, women pretend that they are younger, lighter and less sexual. In a word, less. He points out (apart from height) these dimensions only increase with time, so women lie and pretend to be what they used to be before in the past, whereas men lie and pretend to be what they will be in the future.

The females of all mammalian species, including humans, always have more power than the males,

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17 of my best cooking tricks for real wellness

April 25, 2019May 17, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Here’s a few cooking and eating tips I live by for a Tuesday. Enjoy! Oh, by the way, the new nutrition makeover show I finished filming in January – Eat Yourself Sexy – will appear on Lifestyle YOU in August…in time for Spring. That should give you enough time to subscribe to Foxtel/Austar!

Image by Heather Ford on Unsplash

1. I blend my tomatoes. Cooking tomatoes increases the available lycopene antioxidant content by five times. Blending tomatoes does the same but avoids the heat and oxidation, as well as water and enzyme damaging properties of cooking.

2. Marinate meat in rosemary. Cooking meat at high temperatures can create toxins called heterocyclic amines, linked to cancer. But, marinating lowers the risk by preventing the formation of the toxins – rosemary is the most effective marinade herb to use. Makes sense. They taste good together.

3. Here’s how to do speedy pumpkin: To stirfry cubes of pumpkin (for a quick lunch salad etc) without pre-steaming it, fry it up with a liberal shake of salt. I’m not sure why, but the salt breaks down the pumpkin’s starch faster, so it softens as you fry.

4. I cook with coconut oil. It tastes amazing – a little bit sweet and a bit toasted. And it’s sooo good for you. It’s made up of ninety percent saturated fats (good fats). And 50 percent of the fat content iis a fat rarely found in nature called lauric acid. Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, which has anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-protozoa properties, as well as being antifungal, antioxidant, and soothing. PLUS it supports thyroid gland and enzyme function.Pumpkin in particular tastes great with this oil. It’s also less fattening than other oils…if that matters to you.

in defense of hipsters

November 6, 2018May 16, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

In the Fairfax papers on the weekend there was yet another rant about why hipsters are so not cool.

I find these rants intriguing …but they seem to read the cultural cues a little wrong. Through an old prism, somehow. So here I’m going to go into bat for these earnest, oddly cardiganed folk.

To confirm what a hipster is:

Hipsters covet lo-fi goods such as fixed-gear bikes and old-school Lomographic cameras. Their tastes run to 1950s furniture. They crave things that are obscure and typography-related. And they are disdainful of anything mainstream.

London’s Guardian describes a hipster, which historians say popped up in New York’s lower east side in 1999 as “squatting somewhere between MGMT, The Inbetweeners and Derek Zoolander [ouch!] … this modern incarnation is all mouth and skinny trousers”. And ipads, and second-hand shopping and cardigans and hanging in obscure coffee shops and having slashie careers (T-shirt designer/cafe owner/web design business etc).

You get the picture. (And I should confess that I certainly don a few hipsterisms: the black Buddy Holly glasses. The single-speed bike. Which is not why I feel compelled to defend hipsters.)

The thing is, critics bag out the affectations as being all about irony. And therefore flaccid.

is it time to stop the twitter sycophantic-a and get real?

May 15, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

In Sunday Life this week I get more authentic online

A theme that crops up consistently in this weekly flirt with life betterment is something I call “too much-itis”. Or “battered (by) life syndrome”, a condition charcterised by a sense that too many commitments and distractions are dragging us down. The American Academy of Pediatrics have just diagnosed the latest symptom: Facebook Depression, caused by reading friends’ updates and feeling your life sucks in comparison to the fabulous “wine weekend away with the boyf” and “ZOMG! Most blissful afternoon on the harbour with besties” everyone else is breezily engaged in.

I used to call this malaise Friday Night Alone Watching The Bill-ophobia. Previously, a mere suspicion everyone was out having more fun than you fuelled the panic. But since everyone now has Facebook and Twitter on their phones, there’s no doubt. We all know exactly – in real time – how much fun everyone else is having. Which has upped the heart-sink.

I now call it Friday Night Alone Reading Status Updates-ophobia.

Me, I’ve become totally overwhelmed by other people’s status updates. An article in this magazine on the subject a few months ago, prompting a wave of “me too!” feedback. My journalist friend C has since taken a Twitter hiatus. “I can’t deal with the spin. It feels so grubby.” My single friend G has turned off Facebook; “Too many ex-boyfriends with baby photos!”.

Quitting social media altogether is one solution. I’ve previously tested e-toxing (living offline) and creating e-boundaries (like using the Freedom app which blocks social media for eight hours at a time) in this column. They’re great. But extreme. I personally get a lot from Twitter in particular – it’s the most efficient way for me to read the news each day.

So this week I experimented with some more balanced – and balancing – approaches.

an oodlie…and why you shouldn’t sleep with your microwave

November 6, 2018May 13, 2011 by Sarah Wilson

Remember my chat with Joi about oodlies from earlier in the week?

She made this one for me. With this note: “I was going to give you harry potter glasses but felt it would be too busy what with the dog hugging you and the other oodlie sniffing your hair.” She also asked if I have an obsession with cleaning my ears. Which I do. But unrelated.

Also unrelated. But useful. Remember I wrote about how to detox your apartment? (And I discovered my bedroom was a dungeon of EMF evil?)

Well, I found out you can HIRE a guass meter FOR FREE from the Government.