Eat Your Colors: Eggs

Britt keeps up with the food hippie stuff more than I do, but I have heard from time to time that the new trend in deciding on what type of diet one should be eating is to "eat your colors."

The main intent of this notion is that each color in a food represents a different vitamin or mineral and that by eating a variety of colors you are also consuming a variety of necessary nutrients.

This seems awfully simplistic but as a ceramic artist I am accustomed to the visual cues that certain mineral oxides display in a given clay body or glaze recipe. While these days we order mined or purified forms of minerals (red iron oxide, cobalt, potassium carbonate etc.) from specialty shops, in the initial stages of glazing ceramic objects early peoples had to rely on the naturally occurring mineral deposits found in trace amounts in the materials around them.

In fact, the first glazes weren't even applied to the ceramic objects at all, but rather each object was given a vitreous, glossy surface simply by the ash from the wood used to stoke the fire achieving such high temperatures that it began to melt and left behind trace minerals such as calcium and potassium, which when left to cool, hardened to a glassy finish.

Because of my background in ceramics as well as my identity as a Catholic I have a intimate understanding of the hidden inner essence of things which are often only hinted at by outward appearances.

That being said, the thing which finally convinced me to foot the bill for cage-free eggs wasn't animal rights, wasn't ecology, but rather it was the fact that factory produced eggs have less food in them.

Sure, a dozen cage-free eggs is still 12 eggs as much as a dozen industrial eggs. But within each egg which came from a chicken who was allowed to actually walk around and maybe even scratch around to eat a bug or two there is a substantially larger amount of nutrients.This became most evident to me when I compared a run of the mill, industrial egg to one of the cage-free eggs we purchased. The color difference was striking, the yolk of the industrial egg literally paled in comparison. It was yellow, barely yellow, where as the cage-free egg was what one might call orange.

According to Real Food University , which sites studies from two articles published in Mother Earth News, an egg produced by a pasture raised chicken versus an egg produced in an industrial egg factory contains:

• 1/3 less cholesterol
• 1/4 less saturated fat
• 2/3 more vitamin A
• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
• 3 times more vitamin E
• 7 times more beta carotene
• 4 to 6 times as much vitamin D

Of course, as with all dietary guidelines, understanding vocabulary is half the battle. I mentioned above how we had decided to switch to cage-free eggs over standard industrial eggs. However, after re-watching The Natural History of the Chicken (a splendid and highly entertaining mini-documentary by the way) I saw a scene of a huge industrial barn swarming with chickens and lamented the practice to which Britt said, "yea, well that's technically cage-free."

Sure enough, the rolling lush green hills littered with frolicking chickens which I had imagined was an utter fantasy compared to the actual practice of cage-free egg production. Now, don't' get me wrong, when given the option between a cage of chickens huddled unhealthily close together who are never allowed to walk around or even touch solid ground and the crowd of chickens I saw milling around the floor of the vast barn complex, I'd gladly choose the latter, however its still not quite the ideal I had in mind.

In comes Val, our new Transylvanian Naked Neck, and her lovely large brown eggs. Because we were saving some to give to the priests who serve our parish we actually had yet to eat any of Val's eggs until this morning. Charlotte eagerly helped crack them and was excited to make breakfast with me, however we only had two of Val's eggs to the third egg I added to the skillet was one of the cage-free eggs we had bought. The difference was stunning, in fact I had flashbacks to the day we compared industrial eggs to cage-free eggs. The difference was so stark that while our typical breakfast conversation is Charlotte asking for more "yellow egg" (yolk) today she was asking for another bite of "orange egg."

I'll give you 1 guess as to which 2 are Val's

Why are Val's eggs so much deeper in color? Because not only is Val not confined to a tiny cage, not only is she allowed to walk around and scratch up the dirt to eat bugs and rocks (both of which have a wide array of mineral contributions to her diet) but she also gets to see the light of day. Whether you care about humane animal practices, if you care about your food you'll quickly realize that a happy chicken, is a productive chicken, in both the quality and quantity of her eggs.

I can only imagine what it would be like to compare Val's egg to an industrial egg, it would be like seeing a yolk's ghost.

Moral of the story? Don't just eat your colors. Eat vivid, deep, rich colors, because there's more food in there than their pale counterparts.

Make It!- Making Room for the Rosary

As you may already know, we are a Catholic family. And today, October 7th, is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

It's also my dear sister's birthday.  Happy birthday, Genevieve!  I love you!

I am not nearly as devoted to the Rosary as I want to be, or as I should be.  But recently, I rearranged my house.  I do this pretty often, actually.  Maybe every month or so a room will be completely re-done, or partially at least.  So this is my "Make It" for today, even though technically I did this a few weeks back. 

Our Family Shrine, with Tryptic by Gwyneth Holsten

Make room, then Make A Room, for Jesus and Mary.

Joey and I have always had a small family shrine.  When we were engaged, Joey found a beautiful sofa table at a thrift store, then he ordered a Prie Dieu (or kneeler), and a Resin Crucifix. When we got married we lived in a 2 bedroom apartment.  There, our Family Shrine lived in our master bedroom. Since Joey lived by himself for several months before we got married, when I moved in, I basically filled the second bedroom with boxes from my apartment that I never got around to going through until we moved into our house. So the shrine stayed in the bedroom.  It was seriously dusty- both because it was under the air conditioner vent and because it was never used.  When we prayed together, we either did it on the couch in the living room, or anywhere else.  There was too much visual clutter and not enough space to properly use our beautiful little shrine.

a view from the kitchen door

Then, when I was 8 months pregnant with Charlotte, we bought and moved into our current home.  We set up the shrine in a prominent corner of the living room- and basically forgot about it.   I often prayed my rosary while rocking the baby to sleep, and Joey prayed his while riding the commuter train into class downtown, and when we did get the chance to pray together, it was often while we were lying in bed just before falling asleep- or more often, WHILE we fell asleep.

But I've become more and more convinced that it is more important, especially as Charlotte gets older, to pray our family rosary together, awake, and in a special place.  So I made one.

Tryptic by Gwyneth Holsten, Family Bible, our rosaries (Charlotte's is the prettiest don't you think?), Holy Water, a small Bible for study, and our Relic of St. Roch (not pictured are the statues of St. Roch and Our Lady of Victory)

In our house, we have a small dining room off of our kitchen.  We also have 2 "living rooms"- one in the front of the house connected to the dining room, and the other on the back of the house connected to the kitchen and garage.  I've made the back living room into a toy/play room, which has made my life so much easier!   All the toys have a place- in THAT room!  But the front room has been re-purposed a million times.  And that's where the shrine was.

So instead of having a tiny, squishy dining room and a useless living room, I switched them- partly.  I put the table on one side of the living room with a coffee area on the other side (2 comfy chairs and a table) and the loveseat, shrine and a bookcase in the dining room- now "sitting and praying" room.  The loveseat faces the shrine.  This is amazing!  Now, every time I sit down to nurse or anything else, there's Jesus, in my face!  I haven't failed to pray the rosary yet this month, and even better, Charlotte is reminding me when I do forget.  Yesterday, she brought me my rosary and asked to pray.  I love having that little Holy Minute (or 20) with her and Beatrice in the middle of the day or, like today, after dinner with Daddy too!

View from the new dining room into the old one

So, I made myself a space in my home for prayer, and I'd like to challenge you to do the same.  Not just a space in your schedule, because we all know how ever changing those can be when you have small children, and not just a place in your pocket where you forget about it until you wash your clothes, but in your home for you to share with your children and spouse, and anybody else who may be visiting.  Mother Teresa said "The family that prays together stays together, and if they stay together they will love one another as God has loved each one of them. And works of love are always works of peace." And our own Bishop Conley this week recounted the story of a friend who owed his marriage to praying the rosary together every day. 

From my coffee chair

So whether you pray the Rosary, which is a beautiful scriptural based method of meditative prayer, or some other form of prayer and meditation, make room for it in your life both spiritually and actually.

Good Catholic art (again, by Gwyneth) and a little Catholic Library round it all out.

Inspired Wisdom

Britt and I were talking about the upcoming couple of weeks, and what we've learned from the last few and in the midst of our conversation this bit of inspired wisdom came forth:

"investment of time mitigates investment of money"

Sure, its not news, but it was eloquent enough to someday become a cliche.

And after all, cliche's are true, you know.