LILL's LIST

We all know that sleep is good for us, but most of us don’t get the recommended 7 hour minimum. So, we’re tired and maybe a little irritable the next morning, but after our first cup of coffee, we’re fine.

NOT!

First of all, sleep isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. We might think that we’re “getting away” without enough sleep, but it’s a deficit that mounts up until it crashes and so do we. One of the most damaging results of too little sleep is that it makes us fat.

It has to do with cortisol, a hormone that encourages our bodies to store fat – especially in our bellies. While lack of sleep isn’t the only reason our bodies produce cortisol, it’s a major reason. The less sleep we get, the more cortisol we produce and the more belly fat we put on.

Empty calories and poor nutrition add to the cortisol deficit and we end up overweight, overstressed and overwhelmed. We’re so tired that we find ourselves living on stimulants like coffee, sugar and energy drinks. Well, all that energy has to come from somewhere.

Too often, instead of the natural energy we get from a healthy lifestyle of good food and enough rest, we get our energy from caffeine, nicotine or sugar, which stimulate our cortisol production, but don’t put any nutrients into our bodies to support our hormonal systems.

Instead of staying up and surfing until 1 in the morning, you might want to think about reading for a few minutes and turning the light out at 10. A short stroll after dinner and then a warm bath a half hour or so before bedtime will encourage sleep, also.

Along with a healthy weight loss plan, cutting down on cortisol production will help you shed pounds of belly fat. Start your cortisol-reducing plan by cutting out all stimulants, if you can, for at least a month.

If this is too difficult, slowly reduce the amount of stimulants until you’re down to almost none and then quit for a month. After that, slowly add one or two cups of coffee a day, a dessert once or twice a week or an energy drink only on Saturday morning.

You might find though, that you feel so good from the restful sleep and calm unstressed out feeling of living without cortisol boosters, that you don’t want to go back to them.

Studies show that people who eat breakfast lose more weight than people who skip it. One way to turn yourself from a breakfast-skipper to a breakfast-eater is by making sure that you have something that you’ll really WANT to eat in the morning.

Muffins are a great choice. They’re easy to eat right out of hand. They can be as healthy as you want them to be with the addition of fruits or veggies. Best of all, if you make them yourself, you can keep the calorie count to a minimum and the nutrition to the max.

Here’s a recipe that uses a boxed mix as a shortcut, although you could also use your own Oat Bran Muffin recipe. Just remember that this will probably change the calorie count.

The apricots can be exchanged for any similar fruit. Dried apple, pineapple, cranberries or blueberries are good substitutions. Also, you can vary the juice to suit the fruit that you use. Think cranberry juice cocktail or pineapple juice.

Apricot Muffins

Number of Servings: 9

Preparation time: 25 minutes

Ingredients:

1 box oat bran muffin mix or recipe for oat bran muffins, prepared according to directions except for the liquid

3/4 cup juice (apple, orange, etc)

1 large apricot, peeled, pitted and chopped

1/2 cup golden raisins

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 ºF. Use light olive oil to just coat 9 muffin cups. In a medium mixing bowl,

combine muffin mix and juice just until moistened. Do not over-mix. Gently stir in raisins and apricots. Spoon the batter into muffin cups until almost full.

Bake 12-14 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when you insert it into the center of a muffin. Remove muffins from pan and cool them on a wire rack.

Nutrition Facts

Servings: 9

Serving size: 1 Muffin

Calories: about 260 when prepared from boxed mix

Autumn is my favorite season. This could be because apples are my favorite fruit and fall is apple harvest time. Right at the moment, I’m sitting here tapping my foot and wishing that the Macs and Paula Reds and other early apples would hurry up and make way for my all-time favorite apple: Wolf River.

Now, unless it’s right off the tree, you probably wouldn’t want to just eat a Wolf River. They’re tart and they don’t keep well. But if it’s a baked apple you want – as it so often is with me – the Wolf River is your fruit. It’s large – some are downright huge. It holds up to baking and its taste actually improves with oven cooking.

The following recipe will also work with other “baking apples” if you can’t find a Wolf River in your neck of the orchard. My second choice for baking is Honeycrisp, Jonathan or Braeburn. Although many cookbooks recommend Granny Smith and Golden Delicious for baking, I don’t. I find that baking kills the flavor of the Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples come out mushy and almost sour, or at least that’s what my tastebuds say.

Simple Baked Apple Recipe

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Wash 4 organic apples. Core and make a slice across the bottom to help them stand up, if you want. Fill the place where the core was with a quarter of the following mixture:

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ginger

a pinch of salt

Drizzle apples with 1-2 Tbs of ONE of the following: maple syrup, honey or molasses

Then pour 1/2 cup of ONE of the following over apples: apple juice or cider, cranberry juice or any other liquid you like that goes well with apples and doesn’t catch fire when exposed to oven heat.

Baking time varies with the apple variety, so check them after 45 minutes and keep checking until a fork inserted into them goes in easily. Let them rest for ten to fifteen minutes after they’re done which will give you time to go out and get the vanilla ice cream in the big freezer in the mudroom, if you live in Maine.

If you prefer to nuke your apples, you can use the same ingredients, but just microwave in a suitable container at high for about 5 or 6 minutes and then check with a fork. This can get messy, so cover them with waxed paper.

If you like, you can add nuts and any spice you like to the apples before you bake them. However, then they wouldn’t be Simple Baked Apples, now would they? So, I don’t.

If I had to come up with a one-word synopsis for the summer of 2009, it would be “rain.”

In Maine, we had one week of sunshine in August and nothing but rain for 99% of June and July. Now, it’s in the 40’s at night and the low 70’s in the daytime. Great fall weather, except for two things: We didn’t have a summer and it’s not fall.

Still, it’s nice weather and we’re taking advantage of it. Daughter and Son are stocking up on Vitamin D and the dog is back to chasing tennis balls instead of deer flies. Unfortunately, for most of the kids in our area, school started just as the sun came out, so they’re missing out on the best days of summer right now. Unschooling is a wonderful thing when the weather gods send gray days, let me tell you.

Another wonderful thing when your weather stinks is to look at what people are having to put up with in other parts of the US and the world. We might have had weather that only a mushroom could love, but we didn’t have forest fires, droughts, high winds or tornadoes or days in the triple digits like the southwest had. We did have a few hot, humid and hazy days when the ozone level was high even in Acadia Park, which should set off warning bells for everyone who cares about climate change. But we’re lucky to live on top of a hill where there’s always a breeze, even on the hottest day, and we’re surrounded by thousands of acres of trees.

I recently read that stress is the number one killer in America. In the same article, the author said that people who manage to find the slightest bit of good in bad things avoid the physical and mental damage that stress does and live longer. Okay, I can do this. This summer wasn’t that bad. We’ve had worse. We saved on A/C. Didn’t have to put it on once. Of course, the only A/C unit we have, which is barely big enough to cool a closet, is still in a box out in the garage.

But there’s also the fact that we won’t have to worry about a water shortage for a long time, and that’s a big plus, especially for the farmers. Perhaps, after drowning us for three months, Ma Nature will soften and give us a mild winter. That would be nice. Hey, I’m looking on the bright side here, something that doesn’t come naturally to Mainers who have lived through decades of mud, snow and black fly seasons.

So, to relieve stress, I’m completely ignoring the few days of summer that we have left. Instead, I’m looking forward to the gorgeous fall days that we almost always have here in Maine. Golden October and Nippy November. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I hope.

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If you happen to be awake at 1:45 a.m. on June 21st, you’ll be able to greet the Summer Solstice with open eyes. Of course, if you’re in my neck of the woods and you’re outside, your eyes might get full of raindrops and/or mosquitoes. This IS Maine in June and the recent monsoons have really bucked up the small insect hordes.

What with the lowering clouds and frequent showers, it’ll be hard to tell that this is the longest day and shortest night of the year. Also not readily apparent is the fact that – from here on out – daylight starts to fade and second by second, we lose a little bit of daylight every day until we get to the Winter Solstice on December 21st of this year.

No way do I want to think about that when daisies are blooming, humming birds and bees are buzzing around the comfrey and wild strawberries are sparkling in the grass like rubies. So,  in spite of the rain, the bugs and the dwindling tomato growing season, I’ll celebrate summer’s entrance and hope that the sun will return, also, before the slugs take over the garden.