Free, Free, Free!! Thanks, Dr. McDougall!

I suppose by now all of you have gotten this email from Dr. McDougall?

Dear McDougall Friends,
During this uncertain time, there is nothing more important than staying safe and healthy. Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center has always been dedicated to educating the public on how to obtain and maintain optimal health through the numerous articles Dr. McDougall has written over the years on various medical conditions and topics. Now is the time for us to help as many people as we can. How? We are offering all digital content on our website free of charge. 

See the email itself for the links to everything.

I'm now downloading the zip for the one DVD set I don't already own and the few ASW videos that I never purchased, and I already had purchased all those books when he first put them on his store and had them on my Kindle already, but WOW!! For anyone who hasn't, this is a fantastic deal! Thanks, Dr. McDougall!

But I'm a pessimist - I wonder what's going on with him.

 

Working on My Harmony House Stash

If my husband and I can't leave this apartment until autumn, that's fine with me. HE is a little antsy staying indoors and likes to walk back and forth to C-Town, but I keep reminding him that every time he (and our son) goes out, we start the quarantine countdown over again. With our son working 5 nights a week, we're never really out of quarantine. That's very scary to me.

But even though the shelves of my usual grocery store are still bare, and waits to get into the other chain grocery and department stores are an hour or more long, and the only way to get a grocery delivery window - IF the stores have the items you want - is to stay awake all night constantly hitting the refresh button, I am so glad that Harmony House (and Amazon, of course) exists! Spinach, broccoli, celery, onions, carrots, mushrooms, white potatoes both diced and slices, sweet potatoes, peppers, lentils and pinto beans, blueberries, mixed vegetables by way of a vegetable soup mix, peas, cabbage, jalepeno peppers - and probably a few others I missed - are all lined up on the shelves in the hallway outside our apartment door and squeezed into a few places in the apartment. I had to moves piles of books around to find room for them inside, but I really should read those books then donate them, anyway.

Thanks to Amazon and its vendors I have almost 50 pounds of beans around the place, too. And over 100 pounds of rice, mostly brown but a bunch of white bought locally, too, because it doesn't go rancid like the brown.

We're starting to have trouble finding canned tomatoes lately. C-Town has plenty of diced and stewed, but none are no-salt added, so when something calls for 2 cans of tomatoes, I use one unsalted and one salted to stretch the healthier ones out a bit longer. Forget about suggesting making from fresh - tomatoes have been lousy for a while now and not just pale pink to white inside but pretty much tasteless. It's been that way for years. I already mentioned a few times how scarce frozen veggies have been.

My current menu is made up of mostly soup meals, a few rice, bean, and veggies ones, and when we don't feel like either of those, pasta meals(Over 20 pounds of pasta in here, too). All of those can easily be made from the stash of food I already have in the apartment.

Last night I made up the Sweet Potato and Yellow Split Pea Soup made from this recipe. I used 1 cup of dehydrated sweet potatoes soaked in 2 cups of water for about a half hour; for the mirepoix veggies I used a half cup each of dehydrated onions, celery, and carrots and added an extra 3 cups of water to the Instant Pot. I tossed about 1/2 cup of dehydrated spinach, too, because we love it and it makes the soup a wee bit healthier. For the liquid smoke I used hickory. And oops, I just realized I forgot to add the tablespoon of no-salt seasoning (usually Mrs. Dash Table Blend). It wasn't missed. Instead of cooking it on the stovetop I tossed it all into the Instant Pot and cooked it for 8 minutes, the time I've made other lentil and pea soup recipes. Even after I let it sit with the heat off until the pressure sensor dropped down and then at least another half hour, it was still red hot when I opened the lid and served it.

The soup was as thick and delicious as it always was when I made it with fresh veggies. My husband said if he didn't help me carry those gallon containers of veggies from the front hall he would never have known I used them. I forgot to take a photo of it in the pot or bowl, but here's some of the leftovers in their container, waiting for me to eat them for lunch:

Tonight I'm making the Bob's Red Mill Veggie Soup, but unlike when I made it here, I'll be using the dehydrated onions because I only have one bag left in the freezer and one raw and I'm saving them for a special occasion meal. Dehydrated spinach, too. I have none of that left and C-Town hasn't had it in almost a month. It's a good thing I just got a 5 pound box of it (and 20 pounds of carrots) delivered from Harmony House over the weekend! Now I'm debating whether or not to also buy the box of onions.

As I said, I have enough food in the house that we can do without shopping in person for quite a while. I won't be making anything fancy, just good, simple foods. Dr. and Mary McDougall would be proud of me!

From the Fingers of Dr. McDougall

In a recent post on the official McDougall forums, Dr. McDougall wrote:

 Me Too!

Post by John McDougall » Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:28 pm

From March of 2017 until now we have had some life-changing events. Mentally and emotionally we are better off from the experiences.

In March 2017 Mary fell in a hotel room in Portand and fractured (seriously) her left acetabulum (head of her arm bone). She had the metal and screws removed in February 2018 and had almost overnight pain relief.

Oct. 2017: The wildfires of CA (Tubbs) took all of our material possessions (cars, home, etc.).

In November of 2017 ) (during post fire confusion) I fell off of a rental home porch and fractured my left femur (leg bone - not hip). I almost bled to death and suffered from acute renal (kidney) failure. I had blood transfusions and a surgical repair with a screw.

Since then we have had several minor fractures, but have otherwise recovered remarkable. We are left elderly and disabled, but still mad as hell and fighting for you, your families, and Planet Earth until the end.

John McDougall, MD

New Jersey Guide to Stopping the Spread of Coronavirus

Local Grocery Store

People online think I'm greatly exaggerating when I say the local chain grocery store I used to shop in pre-Covid-19 (Stop and Shop) has nothing on the shelves a month after all this panic buying started.

These photos appeared on one of the unofficial Facebook communities geared towards residents of our city. They were taken Saturday, April 18th, during the senior shopping hour between 7 am - 8am. The woman who took them said they had a few containers of milk left in the dairy aisle, and a bit of cheese and yogurt, but suspected it would all be gone by the time she left the store. There was also some fresh food in the produce aisle, like apples, onions, a few bags of carrots, and some already brown and yucky bagged salads, but those salads were always that way even pre-Covid. This is how the rest of the store looked:

This is about how it looked the last time my husband and I walked in this store back on March 19th. That was the last time I was in any store, or the car, and the penultimate time out of the house. I had a podiatrist appointment the last week of March that's within walking distance, so no car ride.

People who live in other parts of NJ say their Stop and Shop store also looks like this still. Rumor has it (and managers deny it) that the company is neglecting neighborhood stores in favor of Peapod distribution centers. With what my son said his Target store may start doing by the end of this coming week (curbside pick-up or delivery only - stores closed to customers), I believe it.

I am so grateful for our neighborhood C-Town within walking distance of the house and Harmony House deliveries! Our son has even started buying stuff at Target when the night manager (Yes, our son is back to working night shift again) opens the registers during the dinner break. Every morning he's been bringing me home goodies, mostly in the form of toilet paper, Brita filters, and some canned goods our little store doesn't have. Tonight's Sweet Potato and Yellow Split Pea Soup is going to have dehydrated carrots, onions, celery, and even sweet potatoes. Let's see how it goes. This is the "new normal" around here.

PS - I see I was wrong when I said C-Town was a "chain of 5 stores" in other posts. I must have mis-heard the manager when he opened a few years back and he, personally, owns 5 stores. The chain itself is 140 stores, independently owned and operated. I guess I should read the store's website more often.

Now THIS Is the Kind of Week I Had

With all my bitching and moaning about my sewing machines the past 2 weeks, I laughed uproariously at this video. When my husband saw it, he said that she was having a better day than I did this past Thursday!

Dr. McDougall's Dietary Therapy and The Starch Solution Programs Now FREE

OMG!!

What else can I say about this gift from Dr. McDougall!?

The Starch Solution Certification Course (minus the CEUs and Certification testing, of course) is now available for free on his website. It costs you an email, that's it. You get both audio only mp3 files or full length mp4 videos. The first 17 are his lectures about the topics covered in The Starch Solution book, but the last 2 are the McDougall Made Easy and McDougall Made Irresistible full length cooking videos that he and Mary did. I've done many blog posts about recipes I've made from these 2 videos and to this day I still recommend them to anyone wanting to know more about the McDougall Program. I love these because he talks a few minutes about an important topic - blood pressure, or cholesterol, etc. - and then Mary does the recipe segment. The entire McDougall Program in short, concise sound bites! What's not to love?

The Doctor McDougall's Dietary Therapy Course I haven't looked that closely at yet, but it appears to be mostly lectures he had done over the years either at his 10 Day programs or Advanced Study Weekends, or lectures performed at other conferences. The talk he did on The Color Picture Book is in there, too. Each of these 9 videos have a few minutes of new (at the time) video of Dr. McDougall introducing the subject, and the last video is close to 15 minutes of new material about adjusting patients' medications. Old timers to the McDougall program who have purchased the recordings of the Advanced Study Weekends (I have a few but not all) will recognize these talks. I think the only one on Dr. McDougall YouTube page (and in the Quick Start guide on his website) is The Color Picture Book one, as far as I can tell at my quick glance. No audio-only files for this one, though. If you have a teen, heck, anyone under 40, in the house, he or she may know how to rip audio from a video. My son he'll do it for me on his next day off.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!!!!!!

Covid-19 Numbers in My Neck of the Woods

Black Bean Chipotle Slow Cooked Soup

Now that the CrockPot is in a place of honor on an appliance table and not buried in storage, I've been using it more and more.

Yesterday I made up Mary McDougall's Black Bean-Chipotle Slow-Cooker Soup from The Starch Solution book. I figured with Dr. McDougall about to release the Starch Solution certification program into the wild for free and Gustavo Tolosa is going to do an 8-week webinar covering a chapter a week, I may as well focus a little bit more on that book.

Black Bean-Chipotle Slow-Cooked Soup
prep: 10 minutes
cooking time: 8 hours
serves: 8 to 10

2 cups dried black beans
2, 16-ounce cans fire-roasted chopped tomatoes
4 ounce can chopped green chilies
2 cloves garlic, crushed or minced
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/8 teaspoon chipotle powder
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Put the beans, tomatoes, chilies, chili powder, cumin, red pepper, and chipotle powder in a slow cooker. Stir in 6 cups of water.
Cover and cook on High for 8 hours.
Serve the soup hot, stirring in the cilantro as you serve it.


Mary McDougall
The Starch Solution

This recipe is also known as Slow Chipotle Black Bean Soup on the McDougall website. 

Here's a photo of it after just 4 hours on high in my Crockpot. The water level dropped over an inch already.

Notice how most of the water is already mostly boiled out. I left it on high for another 2 hours and at the 6 hour mark turned it down to low. More water had evaporated by then so I added a bit of boiling water and stirred. At 7 hours I turned it down to keep warm and tasted it - a bit flavorless to me, but I chose not to add anything at this point.

Dinner time and I served it over Mary's Corn Bread. I've been making this for so long I don't even look at the recipe any more and sometimes forget to add the cup of frozen corn. It's just as good without it. 

I chopped up a little cilantro to add to the Crockpot.

Uh, oh. I think I ruined it by doing that.

I'm one of those "cilantro is soap" people and used maybe a tablespoon of cilantro leaves, cut up real fine. The smell alone turned me off. I tried remove them as soon as I put them in the pot, but many had already sunk into what little liquid there was left. I served our bowls then spent 15 minutes pushing beans around and removing every trace of green I could find in my bowl. It still tasted like soap. My husband just shook his head, told me he'll take the leaves I took out of mine and pop them in his bowl, and then merrily munched away, helping himself to another piece of cornbread and bowl of this beany stuff. 

I can't call it a soup - it was way too thick and lacking in liquid for that. He said he'll call it "Soapy Chili" in the future. I growled at him and told him cilantro will never pass through my doorway ever again. He reminded me I said that multiple times in the past. I guess I never learn.

Without cilantro, this would be a great use for some of those black beans I loaded up on at the beginning of the covid panic, when stores like Amazon still had food in them. Now, just about any bean I click on says it's currently unavailable, whether from Amazon, Vitacost, or Rancho Gordo. I do plan on making this again, but maybe with spinach instead of cilantro next time.

Cause of Death Graph

I strongly suspect that those heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, etc. deaths are still heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, etc. - it's just that they're now being counted as Covid-19 deaths as primary cause. It's not like their other diseases went away when they caught the virus. This is like my dad's death from various cancers (7 different ones over the 17 years from first diagnosis to death) being attributed to heart failure because, well, his heart DID stop on that day.
(It's a gif file, so give it a few seconds to load and start moving)