Stone to Flesh

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These verses keep meeting in my mind.

Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. –Luke 3:8

and

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. –Ezekiel 36:26

Isn’t it amazing how God takes our hearts of stone and makes children for Abraham of them?

And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. –Genesis 28:14

and

Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. –Galatians 3:16

Be careful, my friends, of fleshly reasoning. Genealogies mean nothing. The work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts is the only thing that saves.

 

Do Troll the Vegans

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It’s for their own good.

It seems at least some vegans feel that the rest of the world owes them a life devoid of delicious meaty scents. Especially while they’re running. While I’m running, I do not worry much about the smell of grass as I fly by the neighbors mowing their lawns. And I certainly wouldn’t ask the neighbors to please not mow their lawns until I’m finished, just because I don’t want to eat that. What is wrong with these people? (But we know what’s wrong with them. They need meat for their brains to work right.)

I did this at a grocery store last year. The look on the starving individual’s face was hilarious:

They’re just hungry, poor things. Grill all day, every day, meat eaters. The life you save will be the vegan that finally breaks down and asks for a bite of real, proper human food.

 

Carnivore Popcorn

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Somebody asked me a while back what they could do for popcorn. My friend, I have found it!

You’re going to have to do a little footwork to procure the materials if you don’t buy your beef in bulk the way I do. If you do, tell your butcher you want the trim fat. And the suet and the marrow bones, and the organs! Don’t waste food! But this is about the trimmings. If you don’t buy your animals in bulk, you can probably go to any butcher and ask for fat trimmings. I promise, they will not think you’re crazy. Just march right up to that counter and ask!

When I got my first big ugly bag of fat with a bunch of red meat still stuck to it, I momentarily thought “What in the world am I going to do with this? Why did I ask for this?” I like suet for rendering, as it gets you a nice clean tallow, but this? This has a lot of meat still on it!

Um, hey…Carnivore person? It’s A BUNCH OF FAT WITH A LITTLE BIT OF MEAT ON IT! Isn’t that what you prefer to eat?

So I diced it up into about 1/4 inch pieces

And I fried it and ate it with my pitifully lean steak. (If you are one of those blessed people who have an air fryer, this would be a good use for it!)

You don’t need to eat this stuff as a side. It would make a marvelous small meal (aka, a snack).

You will never miss popcorn again, I promise. Just try it.

Tiger Nut Flour Chocolate Cupcakes

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These are also sugar-free and low carb, depending on your definitions. 

Print Recipe

Gluten-free Chocolate Cupcakes

An allergy friendly cupcake. No dairy, no coconut, no nuts.
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time20 minutes
Course: Dessert
Keyword: allergy sensitive, dairy free, keto, low carb, sugar-free
Servings: 24

Equipment

  • 2 muffin/cupcake pans
  • 24 cupcake liners

Ingredients

Dry Ingredients

  • 3 cups tigernut flour sifted, then measured
  • 2/3 cups cocoa powder
  • 1/2 cups cassava flour
  • 1 T baking powder
  • 1 T instant coffee

Wet Ingredients

  • 1 cup monkfruit erythritol blend or preferred sugar substitute
  • 1 cup melted butter 2 sticks
  • 1 cup water Milk, coconut milk, almond milk, etc. can be used here.
  • 1 T vanilla extract

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to 350℉.
  • Sift tiger nut flour before measuring, then sift all dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl.
  • Add all wet ingredients to a mixing bowl and mix with a blender or stand mixer whisk attachment until sweetener is dissolved.
  • Add one cup at a time of the dry mixture to the wet mixture, blending thoroughly before adding the next cup.
  • If the mixture isn't quite thin enough to resemble cake batter, also add more water by the tablespoon as you go. Tiger nut flour is inconsistent, in my experience, so liquid measurements are approximate.
  • Spoon or pour cake batter into lined cupcake pans.
  • Bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into a cupcake comes out clean.
Print Recipe

Sugar-free Chocolate Butter Frosting

A sugar free chocolate butter frosting
Prep Time5 minutes
Course: Dessert
Servings: 24

Equipment

  • Stand mixer with paddle attachment or hand mixer

Ingredients

  • 2 1/4 sticks butter at room temperature
  • 1/2 cup powdered monkfruit erythritol blend sweetener or desired sugar substitute
  • 3 T cocoa powder
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 T avocado oil approximate

Instructions

  • Blend all ingredients together except the avocado oil, until homogenous.
  • Add avocado oil a little at a time, as needed, to reach a spreadable consistency.

We made these cupcakes for a birthday treat recently, and they went over well enough that I thought I’d share it. Since we have both dairy allergies and coconut allergies, and I’m just opposed to almond milk on principle, I used water for the liquid. You would probably get a better result with real milk or even fake milk.

I can’t eat even the tiniest bite of chocolate, as I confirmed again recently at a friends’ child’s birthday party. I ate a few chocolate covered banana slices (to be polite, and not at all because I love chocolate covered bananas), and six weeks later, I am finally starting to dry up the resulting acne from my face. I remember during a health class in high school, the school nurse said it was a myth that chocolate causes acne. Well, it might be a myth for some people. It is not a myth for me.

Consequently, I can’t personally tell you whether this cake is any good at all, but the kids loved it!

 

A Palm Sunday Thought

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I was teaching Sunday school this morning. I hadn’t prepared a lesson, but it’s Palm Sunday, so we went first to Mark ch. 10, and then to Psalm 118, which is the scripture the people were singing from as their King entered Jerusalem.
This is also the Psalm that names Him as “the stone that the builders rejected” that “has become the head of the corner”. The very next verse after “blessed is He who comes” says:
” The Lord is God,
and he has made his light to shine upon us.
Bind the festal sacrifice with cords,
up to the horns of the altar!”
All of those people, under the power of the Holy Spirit, were singing of the sacrifice coming to be killed for their sins. I doubt a single one of them had any inkling that He was the sacrifice. They were just singing the song of their Conquering King. Since it was the Passover, they would have expected Him to perhaps preside over the sacrifices, not be the sacrifice.
The chief priests must have been shaking in their boots.
The King was coming.

Book Recommendation: Atomic Habits

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Lest anybody think my sudden return to blogging, even if it’s only five minutes a day, has anything at all to do with any sticktoitiveness within myself, I must recommend the book that got me back on the straight and narrow.

 

I’ve always been fairly organized, and pretty motivated to get things done, and I found a lot of stuff in this book that I had intuitively been doing already in those areas I’m doing well at. But I also found some ways of looking at things that really kicked me in the pants and made me realize that I’ve been wasting a LOT of time letting bad habits, procrastination, and fear pull me away from things that I really want to do, and am capable of at least to some extent, like playing piano and getting actual blog posts in the hopper on a regular basis.

Atomic Habits is well-written and full of practical and philosophical advice. Just don’t pay any attention to examples of healthy habits like getting vaccinated and eating vegetables, and you’ll be fine.

Do I Have the Guts?

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To run this 7-mile race?

I’ve been running between five and fifteen kilometers a week for about three years now. I never really think of myself as a runner, since I only do it because I enjoy that freedom of movement and that much-vaunted runner’s high. But a young girl asked me the other day, while we were talking about some stuff “You’re a runner, aren’t you?”

And you know what? I realized that I kinda am. I don’t just run. I am a runner. I wouldn’t give it up for love or money at this point.

So, why don’t I raise the stakes a little?

I’m about to enter my first race. It would be, like every run I take, a race against myself. I have no expectation of beating any other human. I don’t wonder so much if I can finish it, or how fast–I think I can predict these things–but whether I have the guts to let other people see me possibly fail. Or wear the “wrong” socks. Or look all red in the face and frazzled at the end. And, most likely, “lose”. Even though, for me, just to show up would be a win.

To be honest, my times are abysmal. I’m nowhere near what I wish I was. Seven miles is about twice my usual run, which is habitually 5-6k. That’s all I have time for most days. The top females my age last year did it in about an hour, and I’m pretty sure I can do close to that, anyway.

I’ve never competed, except with myself. I don’t do things for spectators. Is my social phobia so deeply buried (carnivore did that) that I will actually make it out on the big day? And actually do it? Just showing up would be a win.

I’ll let you know if I’m a winner or a loser when the day comes. I just hit “submit registration”.

 

Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You, Part 6: You Didn’t Know Your Reason

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Why are you doing this, anyway?

I will occasionally come across somebody online who says that they tried carnivore, even though they didn’t have any particular reason to do so. By that person’s estimate, she had already been in perfect health and everything she was doing was working just fine. But she wanted to see if the carnivore way of eating would improve anything. And she usually finds that, in fact, she had been a lot less healthy than she thought she was. Her libido roars back to life, or the joint pain that she thought was due to “getting older” goes away, or the ringing in her ears stopped. All sorts of unanticipated pleasant things happen to people who eliminate plants from their diets. It’s almost magical!

But there are, for the first few weeks of shifting to a carnivorous diet, often some unpleasant things to be gotten through. Most of these difficulties can be mitigated by reading the rest of this series: Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You, and taking that advice. If you hadn’t read these posts of mine, though, or gotten advice from someone else who has been there, you might have jumped into the carnivore diet feet first, with no idea why, except that the Meat Life™ sounds like a pretty cool bandwagon, and you didn’t want to miss out.

So you got a few days or weeks in, and stuff started to happen.

You felt lethargic and depressed. You started to feel like you were hypoglycemic. You got explosive diarrhea, or stopped going to the bathroom altogether. It got so bad you just gave up and had the spaghetti one day, et voila, you felt better. Back to your old self. Man, you missed that bread! I mean, the tinnitus came back, and you’re looking a little puffy again, but at least you feel happy!

My friend, carnivore works, even for you. It really does. But because you didn’t have a very strong reason to stick through and troubleshoot whatever was going wrong, you didn’t get to a place where you could experience that. I truly believe that there is nobody whose health or mood is so good that carnivore couldn’t make it better. But without something driving you to eat better, all of the potential pitfalls of the adaptation phase–sugar cravings, social needs, bowel upheavals, or doubts about the medical safety of it–you will quit.

If you’re making a change so drastic as this with no good idea why, it’s going to be, for all but the most stubborn of people, an unsustainable change. If you want to give the carnivore diet a go, know why you’re doing it first. Maybe it is something as simple as “better overall health”. But if you don’t name the result you’re looking for, you’ll likely lose sight of your progress when faced with difficulties. Go ahead and let your reason be “just” tinnitus. But hold on to your reason, friend. You’re going to need it when you’re at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet and your family is chowing down on muffins and waffles, while you’re stuck with the bacon and eggs.

It won’t be enough that you’re just trying out a new way of eating. You will need sweet reason to get you through. After a while, you’ll start to notice other little reasons that you can add to the list. Your psoriasis went away. You’re no longer anxious. You made it through a menstrual cycle without anybody having to call the cops on you. Write all that stuff down. Add every small victory to your list of reasons to stick with it.

And stick with it, friend. Carnivore works.

 

It’s Just Five Minutes

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I can do five minutes!

There was a time when blogging was habitual to me. Somebody would say something, and I’d be discontent with the conversation, and I’d turn it into a blog post. Or I’d have an idea that seemed shareable, and even though I doubted anybody was even going to read it, I would post it. It was fun! I fell out of the habit; what with all the children running around, and having to school them, run the household, tend to dogs and chickens, I just ran out of time.

I thought. I thought I ran out of time. What I really ran out of, was the habit. So I’m going to try to do five minutes a day of blogging from now on, talking about whatever stupid thing happens to be on my mind at that moment. You don’t have to be here to read it, friend. It might be a while before anything worthwhile flows again. I miss my little corner of the internet, and this is me scratching up the straw and making a nice nest to settle back down in.

There. Five minutes. I did it.

What neglected joy could you be spending five minutes on today?