Good evening Sweet Ones
It is nearly 11pm on Monday evening and we have just finished in the kitchen. As I sit typing to you, Cemaaj is packaging up the bounty of tonight’s efforts. We have been working on our cooked vegan offerings and just made our second tofu quiche recipe. Whilst we enjoyed last weeks version we thought it could have more seasoning and I had the idea of adding in a little nutritional yeast to the tofu (who doesn’t love a little bit of extra cheesy flavor and some B vitamins to boot!).
Tonight we made both a crusted and uncrusted version of the quiche. The individual crustless quiches were made in muffin trays and look great on the plate and will be ideal for those with gluten and or calorie concerns. They are also very portable which is always a bonus in our books.
It has been an interesting day. We started with tea with a friend and then lunch with a friend who has a great deal of business experience (not to mention lots of stories where lines like “when I worked for Hugh Heffner” or “yes Oprah made me sign confidentiality agreements” slip out and make you want hear more of the stories but you settle back to listen to the adive they have for you, that kind of friend). So we shared our latest polenta pie with mushrooms and red pepper, topped with Daiya vegan cheez…a yummy and comforting combination of food and totally delish served with a side salad topped with a yummy raw dressing (today was orange, honey, sesame and cashew-divine).
After lunch and a lot of brainstorming and talk about possible avenues for The Cook & Butler to become what we as its potential to reach people and change lives. Exciting times. Amidst all of this I received an email saying that a blog proposal I submitted had grabbed the interest of the editor/webmaster and the mail said, “I was in”. So I have a call in to the editor to find out exactly what he is looking for. I have never written for anyone else but always wanted to find out how it would feel, well now I get to cross it off the list for I will know soon enough.
During our time in the kitchen tonight we listened to a call by Mike Litman of www.mikelitman.com. The call was about Procrastination and Mike mentioned his new project (and Mike thinks big!) called Greatness Nation. Mike wants to reach as many people as possible and coach them, and hold them accountable, to the pinnacle of their potential. We signed up for the trial and have already set out daily, weekly, monthly, 6 monthly and 1 year goals. There really is nothing like having a coach and being held accountable. Mike’s mantra is “You don’t have to get it right you just have to get it started”, the pursuit of perfection can lead to the loss of opportunity…well Mike says a lot of things (check him out he may resonate with you or he may not).
The kitchen has been productive today, as I said, new tofu quiche recipes and on the raw side we made a couple of different cabbage, kale slaws, one with a creamy brazil, hemp dressing and the other with the orange, honey, sesame and cashew dressing I mentioned above, we also made a seasonal cobbler which I called “Take Me to the Tropics” cobbler (it has organic mango and persimmon sandwiched between a crumble made of pecans, date paste, vanilla and cinnamon)…we also made a cauli cous cous (though I have to say the smell of finely diced cauliflower would test the will power of the most hard core cauliflower lover, our taste tester is going to report back-we do not cauliflower so we are not trying it!).
Seems my visioning right now is very active. I don’t mean I am aving freaky visions of things happening in the future but I do keep seeing certain things very clearly in my minds eye as though they are like that already. One example is the farmers market stand…though we have yet to submit the application (of which we are in possession, thank you Sam) and do not have banners or any of the equipment we require, I can totally see people coming and buying our product. For the first time I can see a list of product that would be excellent candidates for the farmers market crowd.
This is not just about trying to get a business off the ground, this is about getting a business of the ground with a primary purpose of helping people and making wellness affordable and accessible to anyone who has the deire to attain it. At the same time we have bills to pay and dreams to manifest so it is a harmony that we seek to give value for value and to always give service along the way. Perhaps that all sounds a little too “New Agery” to you, I can think of a time when I would have thought the same thing reading my words today and that’s how we see the progress we have made.
I used to hope a life like this existed but I am not sure I really believed it. Yet, it would seem, I was too much of a romantic to let the idea go completely and once I got a taste for “forwardly and consciously” manifesting, I wanted more. And it is not about amassing wealth (though that is not in and off itself a bad thing, it should not be the primary force behind a decision, it should be a by product-but that’s just my opinion and a very jotted version at that!) or power, but about reaching your potential to be the happy person you were born to be. I really do believe that and I remember my mother asking me “What did I want from life?” when I told her I was getting divorced at 21 (oh horror), to which I replied, “I want to be happy”. She laughed and told me, “Don’t be stupid, nobody is happy, now what do you want from life”.
I guess I could never really believe that the pursuit of happiness was elusive to all. I did, at times, feel like I had taken a huge wrong turn on the monopoly map of life, that one turn away from dreams led to another and another, until one day you look across the map and even if you could make a turn back it is just too far to travel and too late to do so. Well, I learned something about that assumption too…it is NEVER too late and NEVER too far to pursue what makes you happy. When you in fact fall into the flow of what makes you happy and feel passionate about your life, life takes on a certain flow of it’s own, and though the challenges do not disappear, one feels that they are surmountable and that they are “lessons” to be taken on the journey you have chosen for yourself. At this level comfort comes from much smaller incidences-the time to have tea with a friend in the middle of what is a major workday for many worker bees, a parking spot just when and where you wanted it, a yummy and nutritious meal shared with others, time to walk to get groceries rather than pollute with a car…there are many little things that I am constantly grateful for.
I smile at the last sentence because it seems there was a long time back there in my corporate days when all I did is complain and here I am saying “thank you Universe” when I get a parking spot! Well on that note, I am going to go next door and see Cemaaj is doing, I am alone in the kitchen sitting at the table, I like having this table in here (we just swapped out tables-again!), I have been sitting here with BabyL (my little notebook) and my recipe books researching ad creating (and writing to you)…
Phew long entry, congrats for reaching this point.
Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, make it a RAWsome day.
Shivie
