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Borgenola Raw Breakfast Recipe

IMG_0842 Borgenola, that’s the name of my new favorite raw breakfast.  It’s named after my trusted advisor, Danny Borgen, because it was his brainchild, but like all inventions with a good original formula, it evolved.

Originally, Danny turned me on to his after workout snack/lunch, which was a combination of flax and pumpkin seeds.  As his nutritional trusted advisor, I subsequently recommended chia seeds to replace the flax and later hemp hearts. He, continuously fascinated by the science of food, added raw cacao nibs.

Finally, after all this talk about his combo, I tried it, liking it enough to incorporate it as a breakfast food myself.  To his Borgenola, I added raw sunflower seeds.  The gelatinous chia mixed with crunchy sunflower, pumpkin and cacao nibs offers tasty granola-like textures.  Because of the high amount of protein in chia and hemp, it satisfies, not to mention stabilizes blood sugar levels, but it is light, unlike oatmeal or other grain based morning cereals. Both chia and hemp seeds are also high in essential fatty acids, which give them anti-inflammatory properties. Hemp contains all the amino acids which build protein and aide in developing lean body mass and muscular repair, making it an ideal after workout food.  As for the other seeds, sunflower most notably offers vitamin E, selenium and folate while pumpkin offers magnesium, zinc and manganese.  Cacao nibs, besides its desirable chocolate taste, also offers a significant yield of  magnesium, manganese and copper. All with more nutritional merit than mentioned in this post, these superfood seeds united feel so right mixed together.  Check out the nutritional data for yourself.

Depending on the season, it can be eaten as a warm or cold meal. You can add fruit, jam or sweeteners, or not; chia, neutral in taste, harmonizes well with very little or no sweetener. It’s a clean, simple, high nutrient, non-allergenic, non-inflammatory, raw breakfast or snack that lends itself to infinite permutations.  Try it.

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Borgenola Raw Breakfast Recipe

3 Tablespoons chia seed

1 cup water (hot or cold)

3 Tablespoons Hemp Hearts

1 Tablespoon raw pumpkins seeds

1 Tablespoon raw sunflower seeds

1 teaspoon raw cacao nibs

Optional

1 Tablespoon shredded coconut

Berries, pear or apple slices

1 tsp. maple syrup, agave or honey or fruit jam

Instructions:

Add 1 cup heated or cold water to chia seeds and stir.  Wait 15 minutes until gelatinous.  Stir again and add remaining ingredients.

 

 

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Collage Cure

IMG_0844I hadn’t made collage art in many moons, but when I saw a stack of LIFE Nature Library encyclopedias and a star chart on my neighbor’s curb, I snatched them up for the quiet weekend ahead.  Sorting through images and delving into non-verbalized waters was just the kind of immersion I needed.

On Sunday morning, I found myself surrounded with books and magazines, flipping through pages, reading here and there, and searching for images; I was casual, comfortable with the mess, until I would see something and then out came the scissors.  The open-ended process would suddenly turn into a narrowed down chase. Cutting pictures out, sometimes requiring the X-Acto knife for precision, became my sole pursuit.

I continued to roam randomly through my materials; savagely tearing whole pages out of books and with four snips of the scissors out came graphic images of words too. My hands were busy, and my piles of pictures grew, but nothing was coming together, not in my mind, or on the page.    I threw my Man and Space encyclopedia down.  Useless! Outdated!  A half hour before, collage making felt so purposeful, so easy and relaxed, but with nothing showing for my efforts, doubts started arising. Was I creating meaning or just wasting my time?

Then it happened. The self-doubt gave me access to stronger feelings. With some force, I tore the star chart off its cardboard background; a layer that I had felt inexplicably bound to.  After having thrown off that constraint, my collage quickly came together:  A muscular old lady in a standing pose, carrying a candle on a backdrop of a seasonal star chart.  It clearly expressed my recent reflections on my own aging, and the necessity to keep working my body through all the seasons of my life, and at the same time, carry my own flame, my spark, to keep me moving.

Making art is always revealing.  And unpredicatable.  It is a reliable remedy, bringing to the surface what we are ready to see.

 

 

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Social Climbers

photoFriends and neighbors, Claudia and Jackie, joined me today for stair climbing on this fine, and increasingly rare, sunny morning at the concrete stairs tucked in at intersection of S. Cooper St. and Waters Ave. S. in Upper Rainier Beach. There’s nothing better, in between breaths, than talking about books, gardening and local beautification efforts to take my attention off this demanding, sweaty form of exercise.  All of us carried backpacks with varying poundage (5lbs – 20lbs) of rice or other bulk foods to make it more of a load bearing exercise.  As middle-aged women, we need to keep building lean muscle mass since women tend to lose 5 -7 pounds of muscle a year if not doing weight-bearing exercise.  And besides building strong bones, weight-bearing exercise keeps your metabolism fired up because having more muscle generates more metabolic activity, which burns fat.  At fifty-four years old, I’m all for it.

I would have never imagined that I would voluntarily walk up and down stairs carrying weight, but after my backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains this past summer, I can’t think of a better way to stay in shape and partake in my local landscape.  While descending the stairs, one is treated to wide screen views of Lake Washington, a performance stage for precipitation and light.  Mist, rain and fog can seem so miserable when exercising indoors but can actually be the very elements to invigorate the senses when experiencing them outdoors.

Finally, what gets me out of bed so I can climb the stairs, three mornings a week at 8AM, is I feel stronger and better for the effort. If I feel stronger, I feel more self-confident.  If I feel more self-confident then I doubt myself less.  If I doubt myself less, I feel better about my life.  If I accomplish nothing else than climbing stairs in a day then I have indeed done a good amount of cardiovascular work.

All the work, all the sweat, is so worth it, and so much more bearable if I have company.  There’s no denying it – I am a social climber.

Please join me on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8AM at the intersection of S. Cooper St. and Waters Ave. S.  If you want to do load-bearing exercise, use a backpack with a waist belt so the weight is well distributed.  Increase load gradually.