Keep Guacamole Fresh & Wheat Belly

OK, so this is a random post on guacamole, which we have been eating liberally this week. What is the bane of guacamole? It's very difficult to store for later...so I looked it up and found this solution at: http://www.wikihow.com/Keep-Guacamole-Fresh

But I'll just tell you b/c it's so easy!

1. Put the remaining guacamole in the smallest bowl possible that it will fit while leaving a small lip.
2. Smooth it out flat as possible with a spoon.
3. Carefully smooth out a layer of sour cream on top, sealing up the edges to the bowl. No guacamole should be visible. (I used a thin later).
4. Cover with plastic wrap, starting at the middle and smoothing out to the edges...try to seal out all the air you can.
5. Put in the fridge.

We pulled this out of the fridge later to perfect guacamole!

I could post all the day about what I've been learning about wheat and gluten, if you are interested two of the books I have been reading are Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis and Living Gluten-Free for Dummies by Danna Korn, both of which are easy reading and SUPER interesting.

There is a blog by Dr. Davis here: http://www.wheatbellyblog.com and another amazingly helpful blog on gluten-free recipes/living here: http://glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.ca.

There are compelling reasons, according to my reading, for learning about gluten and wheat even if you do not have Celiac disease, or wheat sensitivities - all laid out in the books mentioned here. There can be affects on joints, allergies, fibromyalgia (my interest), chubby bellies (also my interest:), blood sugar (!), cholesterol, and other areas, for example ADD and Autism. Read the books and decide for yourself.

It's been about a week or two so far, and I am finding it pretty easy, though I still need to work on cutting out the wheat free food that is still not healthy, such as the half a pint of Ben & Jerry's that Jared forced me and Mano to eat the other night - at least we shared it :) The reason I find it easy is that there is no hunger, or counting of calories, or weighing of foods, etc. Basically you eat from this list of foods:

Vegetables
Fruits
Meats
Dairy (for me - some with actual Celiac may be intolerant)(Ice Cream is included in this list!)
Nuts
Non-Wheat Grains/Starches (rice, potato, corn, buckwheat, beans, quinoa, etc.)
Fish
Legumes
Poultry
Seafood
Eggs

I haven't been hungry in any way shape or form, and I don't miss the wheat hardly at all. The biggest trick is to find it all, as it 'hides' in some things in the form of wheat starch, wheat malt (malt flavouring, malt vinegar), wheat germ,  wheat bran, etc.

What is off-limits?

Wheat (includes durum, semolina, flour, bulgur, kamut, graham, farina, spelt, einkorn, and others ).
Barley
Rye
Triticale
Oats (b/c of cross contamination - you can by oats that are not contaminated, search on the web.) I don't know at this early stage if this matter that much to me or not.

Breakfast this morning (plain Greek yoghurt, blueberries, almonds, pecans):

Let me know if you decide to learn more...we can commiserate!

Coralie Bickford-Smith

Two new volumes on the way...I am still short 3 books from the previous release...and that is because I haven't seen them around anywhere. I believe they were released in Canada; the release date for theUL is the 28th. They are The Lady in White, Shakespeares Sonnets, and The Odyssey.

The new volumes coming out, presumably in the UK , since we haven't had a full release of Volume II yet, are: Dante's Inferno and Dicken's A Christmas Carol. Wonderful additions, though I might be too scared to read Inferno. It took all my will power to read The Screwtape Letters...( which I both admired and would probably not read again simultaneously.) I don't do scary in any form.

List of 100...how many have you read?

Cool - I love this kind of question (thanks Dana Burgess). I couple of them I couldn't remember for sure...

The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? I have read _47_ of them; it would be fun to fill in all the blanks this year...but some of them I don't want to read!


1. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen Yes
2. The Lord of the Rings -- J.R.R. Tolkien No
3. Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte Yes
4. Harry Potter series -- J.K. Rowling Yes
5. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee Yes
6. The Holy Bible - Yes
7. Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte yes
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell Yes (in school)
9. His Dark Materials -- Philip Pullman No
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Yes
11. Little Women -- Louisa M. Alcott Yes
12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles -- Thomas Hardy No
13. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller Yes
14. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (all the plays) No, but some.
15. Rebecca -- Daphne du Maurier. No
16. The Hobbit -- J.R.R. Tolkien No
17. Birdsong -- Sebastian Faulk No
18. Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger Yes (Over rated)
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife -- Audrey Niffenegger Yes
20. Middlemarch -- George Eliot Yes
21. Gone with the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell Yes
22. The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald No (Can you believe it? Everyone has read this.)
23. Bleak House -- Charles Dickens No - but it's queued up:-)
24. War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy Yes
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams No
26. Brideshead Revisited -- Evelyn Waugh No
27. Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky Yes
28. The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck Yes
29. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll No
30. The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame No
31. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy Yes
32. David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens Not sure - maybe?
33. The Chronicles of Narnia -- No
34. Emma -- Jane Austen Yes
35. Persuasion -- Jane Austen Yes
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- C.S. Lewis Yes
37. The Kite Runner -- Khaled Hosseini Yes
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin -- Louis de Bernieres No
39. Memoirs of a Geisha -- Arthur Golden No
40. Winnie the Pooh -- A.A. Milne Yes
41. Animal Farm -- George Orwell Yes
42. The Da Vinci Code -- Dan Brown Yes
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez Yes
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney -- John Irving No
45. The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins No
46. Anne of Green Gables -- L.M. Montgomery Yes
47. Far from the Madding Crowd -- Thomas Hardy I think so.
48. The Handmaid's Tale -- Margaret Atwood Yes (thumbs down)
49. Lord of the Flies -- William Golding Yes
50. Atonement -- Ian McEwan No
51. Life of Pi -- Yann Martel Yes
52. Dune -- Frank Herbert No
53. Cold Comfort Farm -- Stella Gibbons No
54. Sense and Sensibility -- Jane Austen Yes
55. A Suitable Boy -- Vikram Seth No
56. The Shadow of the Wind -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon No
57. A Tale of Two Cities -- Charles Dickens No
58. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley No
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time -- Mark Haddon Yes
60. Love in the Time of Cholera -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez No - but I have it to read sometime.
61. Of Mice and Men -- John Steinbeck Yes
62. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov No
63. The Secret History -- Donna Tartt No
64. The Lovely Bones -- Alice Yes
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas Yes (a fave)
66. On the Road -- Jack Kerouac No
67. Jude the Obscure -- Thomas Hardy No
68. Bridget Jones' Diary -- Helen Fielding Yes
69. Midnight's Children -- Salman Rushdie No
70. Moby Dick -- Herman Melville Yes
71. Oliver Twist -- Charles Dickens Yes
72. Dracula -- Bram Stoker No
73. The Secret Garden -- Frances Hodgson Burnett Yes
74. Notes From A Small Island -- Bill Bryson No but this author is great (Thunderbolt Kid)
75. Ulysses -- James Joyce No
76. The Inferno -- Dante Alighieri No
77. Swallows and Amazons -- Arthur Ransome No
78. Germinal -- Emile Zola No
79. Vanity Fair -- William Makepeace Thackeray Yes (thumbs down)
80. Possession -- A.S. Byatt No
81. A Christmas Carol -- Charles Dickens Yes
82. Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell No
83. The Color Purple -- Alice Walker No
84. The Remains of the Day -- Kazuo Ishiguro No
85. Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert No
86. A Fine Balance -- Rohinton Mistry No - but I have this one too to read soon.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven -- Mitch Albom Yes
89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle No
90. The Faraway Tree Collection -- Enid Blyton No
91. Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad No
92. The Little Prince -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery Yes
93. The Wasp Factory -- Iain Banks No
94. Watership Down -- Richard Adams Yes, long, long ago
95. A Confederacy of Dunces -- John Kennedy Toole No
96. A Town Like Alice -- Nevil Shute No
97. The Three Musketeers -- Alexandre Dumas No
98. Hamlet -- William Shakespeare Yes
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- Roald Dahl Yes
100. Les Miserables -- Victor Hugo Yes