GOODBITES® Cookies, Macaroons, and Bites
When your brain is telling you to eat something “beautiful, delicious, raw, and healthy,” turn to GOODBITES® – snacks made by a California-based company that believes “all food – even snack food – can and should be nutritious and delicious.” Organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, and plant-based, GOODBITES® Cookies, Macaroons, and Bites have no added sweeteners, artificial flavors, colors, or additives. No dairy, no eggs, no soy, no junk, ever! Read more 
Fresh Rambutan
For fans of sweet, juicy fruit, stop in at Trader Joe’s this week and pick up a clamshell packet of a dozen fresh Rambutan fruit – large round (golf ball-sized) reddish pink fruit with greenish prickly spines (they don’t hurt) on the exterior.
A tropical fruit native to Southeast Asia, the Rambutan is also grown in Guatemala and imported into the US. Sweet, juicy, and refreshing, the Rambutan is a wholesome, healthy snack that is often described as a big grape with a different kind of skin. Read more
Café Fanny Organic Granola
Back in 1984, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame opened a casual cafe called Café Fanny in Berkeley, California with a simple menu that included her mother’s recipe for organic granola. For the next three decades, the organic granola was the mainstay that customers could count on year after year.
Although Café Fanny closed in 2012, the recipe lives on with Cassandra Chen, the owner of CC Made, a maker of artisan caramels, popcorn, and sauces that bought the original recipe, kept it the same (why change a good thing?), updated the packaging, and added two new flavors to the mix: Flaxseed and Cran-Coconut. Read more
Lupa’s Maple Bliss Sprouted Nut Clusters
Georgia is the largest supplier of pecans in the United States with about 100 million pounds produced annually (that’s a lot of pecans but only a third of what Americans consume annually). Although pecans are often associated with pie, shortbread, and pralines, the rich buttery flavor of a pecan is also delicious toasted, blended with dark chocolate, added to a salad, or used to make clusters – a blend of ingredients that just taste awesome together. Read more
Where does $100 to Homes For Our Troops Go?
Our veterans hold a special place in our hearts because they have put themselves on the front line to protect our country. Although the US Department of Veterans Affairs strives to take care of our veterans when they come home, this is not always the case because the demand for goods and services often outweighs the government’s ability to meet these needs. To make up the shortfall, many non-profit charitable organizations raise funds to help. Read more
The Bees on the Porch
It’s not that I want the bees to die. I just don’t want to share my house with them.
There is a beehive growing on the second floor porch of my house, three feet from my favorite white rocking chair that happens to be my de facto hiding-from-the-world space. For days, I watch the bees work on their hive which gives me a full understanding of how the phrase “busy as a bee” came to be.
My mind wanders and it occurs to me that the housing industry would be completely different if we humans could figure out how to build homes as quickly as bees build hives. They all work together and don’t seem to worry about sub contractors not showing up; and the CEO is a female – a queen bee, to be exact. The bees actually work in beautiful harmony, which makes me feel guilty because I don’t want to share my porch with a beehive that is doubling in size every few days. Read more
Wild Berry Sprouted Trail Mix
Wild Berry Sprouted Trail Mix by Living Intentions is an exotic blend of berries (mulberries, goji, and golden), fruit (currants and sultanas) sprouted pumpkin seeds, cashews, and raw cacao nibs.
Organic, gluten-free, non-GMO, and plant-based, the Wild Berry Sprouted Trail Mix is referred to as “Activated Sprouted Trail Mix” meaning that the ingredients are at their highest potential to provide the most nutrient-dense, flavorful snack available. Read more
The Bright Hour
In 1838, 35-year old Ralph Waldo Emerson sat down and wrote in his journal:
I am cheered with the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and life to the very horizon. That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as the World.
Nearly 200 years later, Emerson’s great-great-great granddaughter, Nina Riggs found profound meaning in that entry and named the book she finished a month before her death at age 39, in February, 2017, “The Bright Hour.” When the reader fully absorbs that journal entry, it’s as if the generations between Emerson and Riggs disappear and that these two people born 174 years apart shared a connection, a knowledge of how hard it is to live when the body is failing, and the beauty of experiencing something so simple – daybreak – to alleviate the suffering. Although Emerson recovered and went on to live another 44 years, dying at the age of 78, Riggs was not so lucky. Read more
Delta Airlines, American Airlines: You Suck
I used to have a lot of empathy for the airlines because I saw firsthand how difficult passengers could be: demanding wheelchairs to board the plane ahead of everyone else and then miraculously walking off the flight when the plane arrived at the destination (because passengers who want a wheelchair have to wait until the other passengers disembark) or carrying 3 or more suitcases, duffel bags, shopping bags, purses, and backpacks. The most brazen would be asked to check their bag at the gate only to tear off the ticket and walk on the plane with their extra baggage and then ask others to help them hoist the 40-pounder overhead. It was enough to almost make you feel sorry for the airlines. Read more
When People Become Pawns
Losses must be answered, grief redressed. ~ Julie Orringer (from Neighbors, a short story published in The Paris Review, Issue 221, Summer, 2017)
Injustices occur in countries across the world every single day and while these events often shock or sadden us, there are incidents that truly outrage us. The treatment of Otto Warmbier, the 22-year old University of Virginia college student, at the hands of the North Korean regime has touched many an American and there have been more than a few who have demanded revenge. Read more
Paddock Post 