Good Natured

Liver Helper

Artichokes to the rescue

By Karen Frye

One of the hardest working organs in our body is the liver. It’s at the center of every metabolic process. Everything, from what you eat and drink, the medications and supplements you take, even the body care products you apply to your skin and hair, gets filtered by the liver. Consuming certain foods on a regular basis or adding effective supplements will help keep the liver working properly.

Artichokes are one of the best liver-friendly foods to add to your diet. In fact, you will often find artichoke extract in many of the liver-detoxifying supplements. The artichoke is high in many antioxidants and a great source of silymarin (also abundant in milk thistle). Silymarin helps to protect and nourish your liver.

Fresh artichokes may be a little intimidating to prepare, although once you get the hang of it they may be on your plate more often. Artichokes are relatively easy to prepare by trimming the base, and steaming them till tender. Dip the leaves in a bit of warm butter and lemon juice — it makes a nice appetizer to share, and you might find your new favorite food!

Here is a simple recipe for summer meals that includes artichokes. The lentils are also good to eat on a regular basis. They are a high source of fiber, especially soluble fiber, which helps to control blood sugar. The microbiome (the microbes that live in our bodies) loves fiber, feeding on it and promoting a healthier gut. Tomatoes are an important ingredient in this recipe as well, as they are rich in lycopene — a potent antioxidant especially helpful for prostate health.

Easy Artichoke Lentils

2 teaspoons avocado or olive oil

2 large shallots, diced

1 large red bell pepper, diced

1 large zucchini, diced

2 teaspoons Italian spice blend (in the summer substitute fresh basil and parsley)

1 15-ounce can lentils, drained and rinsed

1 15-ounce can quartered artichoke hearts, drained

1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes, undrained

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Sauté shallots, pepper and zucchini until just tender. Stir in spice blend, lentils, artichoke hearts and tomatoes. Cook until hot. Stir in the vinegar, salt and pepper just before serving. You can serve this hot or chilled. Add a green salad with all the good things from your garden and you have a delicious healthy meal.

P.S.  Remember to drink your chilled hibiscus tea through these hot summer months.  PS

Karen Frye is the owner and founder of Nature’s Own and teaches yoga at the Bikram Yoga Studio.

Almanac

Snapshots from July are salt-laced and dreamy.

Children skipping through sprinklers on the front lawn.

Baskets of ripe peaches, still warm from the sun.

Tree houses and tackle boxes.

Tangles of wild blackberry.

Brown paper bags filled with just-picked sweet corn.

Last summer, gathered in celebration of July 4, we made a game of shucking sweet corn on my grandmother’s front porch. Two points for each clean ear, a bonus per earworm, yet as husks and corn silk began to carpet the ground beneath us, joy and laughter were all that counted.

And now, memories.

Like Papa’s pickles, made with the cukes from his
own garden.

Speaking of Papa . . . something tells me he would have loved watching us turn a chore into a simple pleasure, perhaps the secret of any seasoned gardener.

The Art of Shade-Dwelling

In the sticky July heat our state is known for, not just the flowers are wilting.

Advice from a fern: seek shade and thrive.

Yes, you.

Bring a hammock, summer reading, refreshments, pen and journal.

Daydream beneath the lush canopy. Bathe in the filtered light. Indulge in the summery soundscape. Cloud gaze.

And if you’re looking for a spot by the water, follow the spiraling dragonfly. She will always lead you there.

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me. — James Russell Lowell

Fresh from the Garden

Eggplant, snap beans, green beans, summer squash. Plump tomatoes are spilling from the vine, but there are two words on my mind: melon season.

In one word: cantaloupe.

And while it’s fresh and abundant, consider some new ways to enjoy it.

Blend it with club soda and honey.

Salt and spice it with crushed peppercorn and sumac.

Toss it with arugula, fennel and oregano.

Make cool melon soup, or sweet-and-salty jam.

Nothing spells refreshing like chilled cubes of it after a hot day in the sun, but if you’re looking for savory, check out the below recipe from Epicurious.

Cantaloupe and Cucumber Salad

(Makes 4 servings)

Ingredients

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup Champagne vinegar or white wine vinegar

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 large cantaloupe, rind and seeds removed, flesh cut into 1-inch pieces

1 large English hothouse cucumber, sliced on a diagonal ½-inch thick

2 Fresno chiles, thinly sliced

1/2 cup unsalted, roasted pumpkin seeds (pepitas)

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1/4 cup chopped mint

Sumac (for serving)

Ingredient Info

Sumac is a tart, citrusy spice generally sold in ground form. It can be found at Middle Eastern markets, specialty foods stores and online.

Preparation

Whisk oil, vinegar, coriander, salt, pepper and cardamom in a large bowl. Add cantaloupe, cucumber and chiles, and toss to coat in dressing. Let sit, uncovered, 15 minutes.

To serve, add pumpkin seeds, cilantro and mint to salad and toss gently to combine. Top with sumac.

Lazy Days of Summer

The full buck moon rises on Tuesday, July 16, which, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, is a good day for pruning, mowing and weeding. But if R&R is more your speed, below are a few obscure holidays you might add to the calendar.

July 10: Pick Blueberries Day

July 17: Peach Ice Cream Day

July 20: Ice Cream Soda Day

July 22: Hammock Day

Happy Independence Day, friends. Happy, happy hot July.  PS

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

The Heat is On

The journey from Alaska to the Appalachians

By Katherine Smith

It’s nice to be hot again. That’s what I tell people when they ask how it was living in Alaska, and how it is to be back home. This time last year, and the previous year, and the one before that, I was living and working deep in the boreal woods of the Chugach, the second largest national forest in the country.

Each summer, our five-person trail crew lived in tents for eight consecutive days every two weeks as we built the forest’s newest trail in an area accessible once a day by train — that is, if the tracks weren’t flooded. The Chugach is where, during my first hitch, a bear clawed through my tent and stole my only clean clothes. It’s where I learned to fell big trees with a big chain saw and little ones with an ax; where I learned to shoot a rifle; and where I competed with the guys to carry the most tools, hiking miles with a sledgehammer on one shoulder and a steel rockbar on the other.

It’s where I grappled with scoliosis, hypothermia and trench foot, and learned the hard way that my worth is not defined by what I can do. It’s where I learned that my four fellow trail workers eat even more than my four siblings, and became known as Mama Kate for Southern-size group dinners of jambalaya, biscuits and gravy, cornbread and collards. I’ve spent solid eight, 12-hour days inside long sleeves, high socks and a bug net as protection against every kind of winged, blood-sucking bug imaginable, and hitches inside fishing-grade rubber raingear and Xtra-Tuff rubber boots, falling asleep and waking each day to the sound of hammering, unending rain.

My favorite hitches were the ones that should have been hardest, redeemed always by my jolly crew family. We’d belt out Irish drinking songs in hailstorms, make doughnuts from canned biscuit dough, carry 600-pound trees together for a primitive turnpike, laugh until we cried, and play games of bocce ball, cribbage and dice long into the night.  

July in the Chugach brought a cacophony of flowering salmonberry bushes, an Independence Day tradition of exploring Bartlett Glacier, and buying a second freezer for all the salmon we caught. July is sunlight by midnight, bears by day, wolverines by night, and lynx prints in the mud. July brought my first wildland firefighting assignment when I was flown out to Colorado and Wyoming for 18 days of adrenaline and exhaustion digging line, laying hose, sawing, protecting cabins when the fire grew closer and, hardest of all, eating MREs. July is Alaska’s warmest, driest month, shooing my crew and me skinnydipping into sun-baked kettle pools and, after long days, into the numbing glacial creeks where we gathered drinking water. One July, the heat climbed to nearly 80 degrees.

Now, back in the 100s, I am exactly where Alaska shepherded me. For the last three summers, I spent my days off gathering the plants that healed my chronic urinary tract, bladder and kidney infections. Now I am in the Appalachian Mountains, deep in a clinical study of the herbal medicine that redeemed my health. I am learning how to read bloodwork and walk barefoot; the chemistry of polyphenols and my body with 500 acres of quiet, virgin land.

There is vastly more plant diversity here, the woods reverenced for their endangered medicinal gems like bloodroot, black and blue cohosh, goldenseal, ladies slipper and American ginseng. The ancient plant healing tradition has been kept vividly alive by the sharing of medicines from native peoples to Irish and Scottish immigrants and African-Americans, whose poverty passed down the knowledge by necessity. And while I am learning textbook assignments of isolated botanical constituents to illness, it’s framed by the Western tradition of herbalism that hails back to Hippocrates — the assessment of imbalance of the individual’s hot, cold, damp, dry, tense and lax energetics.

Here, I’m learning the science of my granny’s medicine.

July in the Appalachians is the sweet scratch of blackberry and briar-draped bushes, peaches for sale in old truck beds, and sunshine as the crow flies. It’s just now here, on the proverbially flying time, and yet we find it just the same as we remember it in our young hearts. It’s good to be home in the first mountains I loved, in dusks wet with locust song, fingers purple with mulberry juice, bluegrass on the front porch, an accent growing familiar again on my prodigal tongue, and, slow and honeyed as the South, the sweet, heavy heat.  PS

Katherine Smith is a wild-prone witness who grew up swinging from ivy vines and hunting water lilies in Pinebluff, North Carolina. She’s returned to North Carolina to study clinical herbalism at the Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine in Lowgap, calling Ireland and Alaska home in the interim.

Birdwatch

Beak House

This time of year sees a hot real estate market for house wrens

By Susan Campbell

Throughout the Piedmont and Sandhills, Carolina wrens are year-round residents easily recognized by their handsome rufous coloring, prominent white eyebrows, cocked up tails and loud voices. The emphatic “chirpity, chirpity, chirp” calls are made primarily by males, although, from time to time, females may join the chorus. These inquisitive birds, foraging almost nonstop in all sorts of nooks and crannies looking for bugs, are known to find their way into garages and even homes if there is a crack large enough for them to squeeze through. In addition, they seek out protected places to nest, often using front door wreaths, mailboxes, hanging baskets and manmade objects of all kinds.

House wrens, on the other hand, are a bit smaller and drabber in coloration. Both the male and female are gray-brown with faint streaking on wings and tail. These diminutive birds are just as feisty as their more familiar cousins. Their song, however, is a lovely mix of bubbling notes that carries quite a way. House wrens, too, are voracious insectivores, found in close association with people.

Once upon a time, they were considered seasonal migratory visitors to both the Piedmont and Sandhills, skulking in thick vegetation during spring and fall migration. In 1922, house wrens were seen nesting in the Piedmont and are now found commonly around Raleigh, and from Greensboro to Charlotte. The first documented, known successful breeding attempt in Moore County was sighted in Pinehurst during the summer of 2007. Since then a few pairs have been reported from Whispering Pines, as well as pockets around the Village of Pinehurst. However, these birds are easily overlooked by folks unfamiliar with the species. At this point, they are almost certainly breeding in more locations in at least the northern half of the Sandhills.

House wrens have a breeding strategy that allows them to colonize new habitat quickly. Females typically produce two sets of four to seven young each summer. The males are frequently polygamous. Interestingly, a female may move to the territory of a different male for the second nesting. And female house wrens are known to raise broods in quick succession. The male may finish raising the first brood as the female begins nest-building for round two.

Unlike Carolina wrens, house wrens are cavity nesters, so they will use bird boxes readily. Small holes are hard to come by on the human-altered landscape — but birdhouses are not. With increased urbanization and the widespread interest in providing for birds, more boxes are appearing on the landscape every spring. Although house wrens will use a box that is pole- mounted, they actually prefer hanging houses. It is possible that this is because dangling accommodations are less likely to be invaded by predators.

The challenge that house wrens no doubt have been facing here in the Sandhills as they attempt to become established, is available “real estate.” When they return to nest in mid-April, the bluebirds, as well as our nonmigratory chickadees, nuthatches and titmice have not only claimed a large percentage of the available bird houses but are also well into incubation. House wrens then must search for an empty box. If you are interested in providing for these uncommon little birds, it is best to wait to hang a suitable box until about April 15. Also you might want to consider a box with a smaller (1-inch or 1 1/2-inch) entrance that will exclude larger cavity nesters. If you happen to attract house wrens, please let me know. We are still very interested in the progress of these birds as they continue their southward dispersal here in central North Carolina.  OH

Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com.