Grow Your Own Kombucha Mother!

I’ve been loving GT’s/Synergy Kombucha for many months now, the taste and the health benefits. Although I think it’s totally worth it, I do not love the price… So I decided to finally make my own!

I knew you needed a Kombucha Mother to get started, but I didn’t know who to trust in buying one or having a stranger ship me one. Plus I’ve got a stubborn side… I had a feeling you could grow one from a bottle of store-bought since they always have those floaties in them, so I did a bit of research and found out how. It’s easy! Here’s what my Mama Booch looks like after just 2 weeks:

And here’s how you can make your own and start enjoying Kombucha without the steep price tag:

Making a Kombucha Mother (Mama Booch)

Dissolve 4 TB white sugar (I used organic) in 2 cups boiling water. Add 2 bags Organic Black Tea (or 2 TB loose). Let steep for a few hours until cooled to room temperature. Remove tea bags. Pour tea mix into a glass jar (at least 1 Quart size), then pour one jar of Plain Raw Kombucha (I used GT’s that had a big chunk in it) on top. Cover with a towel or coffee filter and a rubberband. Leave it to grow in a warm dark place for a few days or a week, depending on how warm it is.

Once the film grows to about 1/8 inch thick, make one quart of tea – 4 cups boiling water, 1/3 cup white sugar and 2 bags Organic Black Tea. Let steep for a few hours until cooled to room temperature. Remove tea bags. Pour into a large glass container (the one in the pic is one gallon size), then pour the other mix on top. Cover and leave in a warm spot until the Mama Booch is 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.

Making Kombucha:

Dissolve 1 cup white sugar in 3 quarts boiling water, add 4 bags Organic Black Tea. Let steep for a few hours until cooled to room temperature. Remove tea bags. Pour into 1 Gallon Glass Jar, add 1 to 2 cups liquid from the last batch, then put the mother on top. Cover and leave in a warm, dark spot for a week to ten days. A baby kombucha will grow on top. When it’s 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick, taste the kombucha. If it’s not too sweet, you can harvest it and start a new batch, otherwise let it go until it tastes the way you like. When you harvest the kombucha, you can bottle it in individual bottles with whatever flavor you want. And if you’re a Kombucha Addict like me, you’ve already got plenty of individual bottles to use!

Tip – Wash all jars with distilled white vinegar prior to use

Fasting

No (publishable) posts for a while as I was a very sick girl for the last month… Oh, Addison’s how you try my patience and resolve…

In yet another effort to heal my poor little body, I’m fasting again. I truly believe in the power of fasting to heal the body. It focuses all of the body’s energy toward healing by saving the energy lost by digestion. Nothing will help your body heal itself faster than fasting! I’ve done four short Green Juice Fasts and attempted the Coconut Oil Detox.

My four Green Juice Fasts consisted of Celery/Greens/Apple/Ginger juice and water only throughout the day. They were great and really easy for the first two days – minor detox symptoms, no hunger, calmness, peace and ease. Unfortunately, day three of all of them brought a crash in my blood pressure and I had to switch to Green Smoothies for days three and four, then I went back to regular (Raw Food) eating. The Coconut Oil Detox (from Bruce Fife’s Coconut Cures) involves eating 10-14 tablespoons of coconut oil throughout the day, along with sugarless lemonade, for three to seven days. The first day was no problem at all, I felt great. The second day I crashed badly, and nearly went into full Addison’s Crisis, so I switched to Green Smoothies again. Apparently it’s a very powerful detoxifyer and my body wasn’t strong enough to handle it. I’ll definitely try it again someday soon, but I’ll have to get stronger first.

Today I began my first water fast. Mostly water anyway, as I may need some Kombucha and/or Sauerkraut Juice to keep my BP up. And if things start heading south, I’ll add Green Juice. So, maybe not a pure water fast, or maybe just a water fast at first, but I’m sure it will be very beneficial either way. Even the four short Green Juice Fasts helped my body a lot – better digestion, less Candida symptoms, more energy, less Addison’s symptoms (after the fast anyway…) I also scheduled my very first colonic for Day 2 of this fast, and hopefully it will help my body dump some of the released toxins better, and this will allow me to fast a little longer. I also joined a group of fasters on rawfoodtalk.com so I’d have the support of fellow fasters and those who are more experienced than I am. So far I’ve learned to just let the fast take it’s own shape and not to try and define it, to listen to my body (not easy for me!) and let it heal how it needs to heal, not how I decide it should.

So I’m already a better faster than before, and I’m still just a novice. If you want to try fasting, just do it!! My mom even did a 10-day fast a while back, and she’s hypoglycemic. My first piece of advice – take it slow and ease into it. Don’t go from eating heavy food one day to fasting the next. Take a couple days to eat lightly on fruits, vegetables and Green Smoothies before you start. Just try a two or three day fast at first so you can see what it’s like, how your body responds to it. If you’re doing great, keep going! If you’re not, or if you have disease symptoms like I did, break the fast and try it again in a couple of weeks. Even just a day of not eating can be very powerful in healing. It’s just a day or two or three out of your life without food, just 3 or 6 or 9 meals out of 100,000 in a lifetime, and the benefits can be truly miraculous. Second, do a little research. There’s tons of websites, books and forums out there to answer any question and learn about all the different types of fasts you can do, plus fasting forums where you can get support and advice. You don’t have to fast alone! Last, just like you have to ease into a fast, you have to ease out of it too. Don’t break a fast with chocolate ice cream or a steak. Your body will NOT be happy, and will definitely let you know it. Green Smoothies are the best fast-breaker for me, especially the Papaya Spice Green Smoothie I posted earlier. It’s filled with great healing things for the stomach. I’ve been adding Lily of the Desert Stomach Formula Aloe Juice to it lately, and it’s done great things for my tummy. Well, now I know what I’m breaking my fast with whenever I decide to break it!

Good luck to all the fasters out there, and special thanks to my new fasting friends at rawfoodtalk.com!

Healing With The Raw Food Diet

I love reading stories of miraculous healing from serious, debilitating, sometimes life-threatening diseases. They give me hope that one day I too will be free from the myriad of problems I deal with on a daily basis. They confirm to me that the human body can heal itself of almost anything if given the proper tools. In many cases the proper tools are simply changing one’s eating habits. Doctors will of course tell you that eating has nothing to do with disease, but they’ll tell people to change the way they eat if they have heart problems or diabetes, so why wouldn’t other diseases be directly related to something we put inside our bodies every day?

No way of eating (that I’ve found) has more of these healing stories than the Raw Food Diet. People have healed themselves of cancer, thyroid issues, diabetes, Crohn’s Disease, back pain, heart disease, candida overgrowth, depression, eczema, obesity, and countless others, including one that particularly interests me, Addison’s Disease.  The theory is that if you give your body a rest from hard-to-digest food that’s low in nutrients and enzymes it can focus the extra energy on healing disease. At the same time, you stop feeding your body poisons like white flour and white sugar, which we all know are bad for us. I like the ease and simplicity of this logic. We always hear that we should eat more raw fruits and vegetables, so why not eat just raw fruits and vegetables, with a few nuts and seeds thrown in… I don’t understand why this is seen as a radical way of eating, but I never liked meat or fast food anyway, so maybe that’s just me.

I’ve been eating this way for 5 or 6 months now. A lot of my food allergies have cleared up, namely my allergy to fruit, and my bent-over-in-fetal-position stomach pains are gone. (I’m not willing to test out whether I’m still allergic to grains, since the last time I tried to eat any my throat closed up. Plus I don’t believe we’re designed to eat grains…) At times I have more energy, and at times I feel like I’m moving through mud all day. I still have stomach issues, probably because part of Addison’s Disease is low or no stomach acid production. I finally found an HCl supplement I can tolerate that I started taking yesterday, so maybe that will help with the stomach issues.

The jury’s still out on whether the Raw Food Diet is helping me to heal or not. I know eating gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free and white-sugar-free has helped me feel a lot better, but I’m not sure whether it’s what I am eating or what I’m not eating that’s doing the most good. I love fruit and veggies, so this is an easy way for me to eat and I will continue it. I guess I’ll have to get back to you with my miraculous story of healing and pictures of my glowing healthy self…

Addison’s Disease

I was looking at one of the Addison’s forums I sometimes follow, and was very sad to see that a beautiful young girl who was diagnosed the same time as me last summer, passed away due to Addison’s Disease. She was 23 years old. Why did I survive my extreme Addison’s Crisis last September (and the many after it), and she didn’t??

I can’t get that question out of my head. I did finally put my Medic Alert bracelet back on though, the summer-in-Florida heat has really been messing me up lately. This morning while walking the dog I got so dizzy I had to sit down. I got even dizzier upon standing (nothing new there) and could feel my heart racing and my vision blurring. I didn’t need the cuff to know my Blood Pressure was tanking. When I feel that bad I know it’s in the 80′s/40′s range. It’s been happening a lot lately. I came inside, drank some Bubbie’s Sauerkraut Juice straight out of the jar and laid down for a while, until I could sit up without the dizzies. I still feel incredibly nauseous and shaky. Typing without a spell check is certainly not an option…

If you’ve never heard of Addison’s Disease, you’re not alone. The first doctor who ‘treated’ me in the ER last year hadn’t either. He called it ‘Edison’s', and left me in a back room to die. But that story’s for another time…

The only time I’d ever heard of Addison’s before being diagnosed was on House. You know the typical scene, when they’re trying to diagnose someone and throw out all those crazy disease names – Addison’s? Cushing’s? Grave’s? Sarcoidosis? You never dream one of those will define part of you for the rest of your life.

So what is it? 

Click here to read the rest of this story –>

Best Chocolate Cherry Smoothie Ever!

I’ve been doing a lot of “Coconut Hunting” lately, one of the few things to love about Florida in August… Nothing beats the taste of Coconut Water that was on the tree that same day! Love the baby Thai coconuts, but fresher and FREE can’t be beat. I’ve become quite the expert on opening them too. Using a butcher knife and a hammer, chop about an inch or two of the bottom off until you either chop a little of the hard shell open or can at least see it. Poke a hole through the shell with a screwdriver, invert the coconut onto a large glass measuring cup, then poke a hole in the side with the screwdriver until you break through the hard shell. When you remove the screwdriver you’ll have created a vacuum and the water will flow out easily into the measuring cup. When it’s done emptying, crack it in half using a butcher knife and hammer, and scoop out the meat with a spoon and your hands. Trim off any brown shell, rinse and eat or store, or make fresh coconut milk! Sounds hard, but it goes really fast once you’ve got the hang of it. Your hands will be really soft when you’re done too!

Then you can make the…

Best Chocolate Cherry Smoothie Ever

by Dana Hamelin

Ingredients:

1 cup Fresh Cherries

1/2 cup Frozen Mango

1/2 cup Coconut Water

1/4 Cup Fresh Coconut

1-2 tsp Agave (optional)

1 tsp Maca Powder

1 TB Raw Cacao Powder

Dash REAL Salt

Preparation:

Blend all in a Vita-Mix until smooth

I also use frozen bananas instead of the mango and agave for this smoothie, but I don’t always do well with bananas. The mango makes it creamy like the bananas do with a bit less sugar (no food coma!). Use agave only if your mangoes aren’t very sweet, or use a dash of Stevia Powder.

Papaya Spice Green Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 cup Papaya

1 Peach

2 TB Papaya Seeds

1 inch Fresh Ginger

1 cup Coconut Water

1 cup Water or Ice Cubes

2 handfuls Spinach (or Watercress)

4-6 Mint Leaves

Preparation:

Blend all in a Vita-Mix until smooth.  For extra spiciness, use watercress instead of spinach. Yummmm…

This delicious and super nutritious green smoothie tastes fantastic and is great for any stomach problems (unfortunately I have many ).