" Plant Based Raw Food - the Delicious Road to Good Health"
Susan Lerner and Fatima NeJame will discuss the health benefits of a Raw Plant Based Diet, and they will demonstrate how easy it is to create delicious food. They will also bring some of their favorite dishes for you to try.
Family health challenges, including Huntington’s Chorea, Multiple Sclerosis, kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, gallstones, colon cancer, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, and her own migraine headaches and kidney stones led Susan to seek out non-traditional solutions to health. When she was challenged with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia in 1996, it was a specific change in dietary habits that caused her rapid recovery. In 1998 Susan discovered raw food eating and, except for a year-long cooked foods “slip”, has been enjoying a virtually 100% raw and living foods lifestyle for almost 20 years.
After injuring her back at age 15, Fatima was forced into a sedentary lifestyle and struggled with her weight and other health problems from a young age. Twelve years ago, diagnosed with high cholesterol and pre-diabetic, Fatima learned about the benefits of a plant based raw food diet and decided to try it. Fatima lost 40 pounds, reversed all her health issues and has been enjoying good health and a delicious raw food diet for 12 years.
Our May meeting featuring “Love It or Hate It” cilantro and the plant’s sweetly spicy seed coriander, introduced our members to one of the world’s oldest known herbs and we had cilantro everywhere we could in the Auditorium.
The Tasting Table had Marci Green’s “Cilantro Salsa and Pear Coriander Cake” and a mystery “ Organic Black Beans” dish. The raffle had the only two pots of cilantro I could find; the first, a healthy “ready to cut” pot from my local Publix (and to date the store continues to have pots) and a bravely blooming, but very small cilantro from our Mounts Garden Guild nursery. The badge plant was a three-gallon cilantro I found at my local Rorabeck Produce and Plants market that had lots of biggies but no littleys but it did have deliciously fresh bunches of cilantro so I got a couple of handfuls so that all of our members got some kitchen-ready cilantro to take home at the end of the meeting.
Meg Vandereedt’s presentation on cilantro/coriander’s medicinal uses was full of information and she got many questions that brought out even more reasons to be thankful for this ancient herb. Marci Green’s culinary aspects of the herb all sounded so edible and easy to prepare. Tom Hewitt covered all aspects of growing cilantro, but not just now in our sub-tropical summer – wait until fall! I opened the program with the history and folklore of our herb of the year and got some laughs on how we know our ancestors in caves used cilantro and its seeds. All four of the presenters wrote on our subjects for the usual booklet we handed out at the May meeting. Ingrid Menz’s beautiful color photo of cilantro blooming in our own Mounts Herb Garden showed us what cilantro can do in South Florida. Ingrid and Cathy Azzarello pulled the four articles together in record time so we can enjoy a useful souvenir of an informative evening.
PLANT RAFFLE: EHS had our usual fulsome collection of 18 herbal plants this May and I’m listing them here so we have a record of what’s available at this time of year: Blooming cilantro, lots of nasturtiums, Vietnamese coriander (not a coriander relative, but it’s got the taste), peppermint, red cardinal basil, rue, blooming calendula, curry plant, Jamaican mint, thyme, Chinese spinach (always a good summer green), patchouli, pineapple sage, Italian oregano, red spearmint, Aztec sweet herb and stevia. Welcome donations from members were: Meg Vandereedt – spearmint hanging basket; Ingrid Menz – coconut scented geranium; Catherine Wingate – edible ginger; Tom Hewitt – Brazilian petunia (what a neat new plant!); Denise Friedlander – plant I.D. tags; Anne Bender (a drop in from the Bonsai Society that she thought was meeting that night) a large iron plant hanger, and a stray blooming rosemary.
And a final note on the Tasting Table: Every dish on the snack side was vegetarian this time, but the dessert or “sweetie” side was deliciously full of “sugar rush” and we had a Memorial Day American Flag cake with strawberries and cream for the stripes and blueberries and dots of cream for the stars.
MASTER GARDENERS: As EHS does at every Master Gardener graduation at Mounts, we give the graduating class a one-year membership at their graduation luncheon and ceremony. Marci Green, Ingrid Menz and I attended. The food is always sumptuous and plentiful and there’s lots of clapping and laughing and congratulating. Mounts and several other plant societies also donate memberships. Now the new Master Gardeners know why plant societies are important to all of us. How it also benefits Mounts, witnessed by our own Herb Garden/Garden of Well Being, overseen by Ingrid Menz and the Palm Beach County Extension. Are you a Master Gardener? If not, think about becoming one, you won’t be sorry.
JUNE MEETING: “The Art of Preparing and Eating RAW Food,” presented by Fatima NeJame and Susan Lerner, two enthusiasts and experts on eating for a healthy and active life. We’ll learn both why raw foods and herbs are good for us, and we’ll have demonstrations on easy preparation. Our taste buds will then be won with delicious vegetarian tastings. Our own tasting table will also feature raw food from our members. I’ve been prepping myself with “The Complete book of Raw Food” by Lori Baird, Hatherleigh Press, Long Island City, 2004 that tells you how chefs around the world use raw food. And, yes, you still can have brownies and cake and pad thai; in fact, Fatima is known for her brownies so we may be tasting them. This talk should set us up for a summer of good, good food. I’m a cookbook reader, besides I like to cook, and I’ve really gotten into this one.
Have a wonderful summer everyone, be well, stay cool, enjoy wherever you spend your summer, and it will be a delight to see all our members in the fall.
Donnie Brown
President
May’s EHS Member Speakers are:
1. DONNIE BROWN: EHS current and past Presidents, Master Gardener, “Herbin Thymes Herb Stuff contributor, tropical herbal enthusiast, wild edibles forager, archaeology/anthropology buff.
2. MARCI GREEN: EHS Secretary, Master Gardener, horticultural schola
Read more: Cilantro & Coriander; The “Herb of the Year 2017”
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