Nice confusion

Recently I had a slightly confusing Twitter exchange with this book's publicist about it winning an award. Actually it was the Gold Winner in Juvenile Nonfiction awarded by Foreword Reviews and their Indiefab Awards. Foreword Reviews is another interesting story...
 

It's not my book.  Unfortunately I had nothing to do with it, but am delighted for the confusion so that I know it's out there. Continuing to educate children about the importance of what we eat, where it comes from and how to prepare it are all good. 

To learn more about the book, click here.

The price of healthy food

--> Everyone knows that healthy food is expensive. But why does it have to cost more for food with fewer additives, less processing and fewer food miles than it does to eat industrially produced food that is nutritionally questionable at best? It never made sense to me. And now I find there is a "fast food" restaurant just down the street that is healthy and locally sourced where possible.
Open less than a week when I visited, this little take-out storefront operation serves up a wide variety of freshly made wraps using good ingredients and many house-made items. The portions are generous and the food is really tasty. And it was surprisingly inexpensive. For less than $10 two people can have a nice lunch (excluding beverages) that is both well made and healthy. Yum. Let's do more of this, please.

Just as cooking at home doesn't need to be hard to do or fancy, this concept is simple at its core. Home cooking and healthy "fast food" both require focus, commitment and time. So there is a choice. What's yours?

You know you have roots when...

It occurred to me that the summer will be the 12th since my move from the "big city" to a small town. It doesn't seem like that much time could have passed. (Isn't that what people always say?) This is particularly true because up until today it felt like I was still a new arrival in town. That my home was still just moved into. And that the deep roots that I had were elsewhere.

Truth be told, the family roots of elders have long since slipped away. Only peers are left and their children and grandchildren. Not that they aren't important, but they aren't the older generation who knew me from birth as a daughter, niece or granddaughter. The ones whose memories extended far back to a time that shaped them and was so different than the one into which I appeared.

But today it became clear that somehow, while missing the roots that were gone, I have put down roots here. While there are many ways to know you are rooted, the one that got my attention was that someone I knew, liked, respected and cared about, lost a parent. An elder. Before today such emails came from mostly family and long-time friends in places I'd been from. Today, the email came from where I live now.

While it is not possible to recapture roots that are lost, having new ones and the belonging they imply, feels good, despite the sadness for the loss of an elder I never met.