Raw vegan hot cross buns? Happy Easter Bunday

So.  Sometimes when I feel low, lost, alone, I take myself back in mind to places where I felt secure and serene.  I know, I know - one should be able to feel secure and serene anywhere - for, really, it makes no difference where one is, does it?  But still...

Yobaba Lounge was such a place.  I'd love to take you there.  It might not suit, of course - we are all different, we all have varying tastes, inclinations, desires.  But, for me, it was a refuge for the mind; a temple of the body; a sanctuary for the soul.   I knew, from the moment I got into Gertrud's campervan at the airport and she started driving to Chalabre, that here was a kindred spirit.  One of my 'tribe'.

Anyhow.  Today I am thinking of Yobaba.  I am wandering its corridors in my mind, trailing my fingers over the wooden bannisters, stretching out on that fabulous bed and snuggling into the zebra-alike throw.  I am curling up in a hammock, with a cat purring under my fingers.  I am giving myself up to the floorboards in savasana surrender in the yoga shala up under the eaves, in the Kether of the chateau.  I am floating, a pale starfish, primordial, on the lake.
If I were there now I might even be walking the labyrinth Gertud has sliced into the lawn...

Are my tastebuds tingling?  Well, I don't usually get too exhilarated about food but for Gertrud's raw alchemy I make an exception.  Can you really make a raw vegan sugar-free hot cross bun?  More to the point, one that tastes good?  Gertrud did.  Follow this link for her recipe.

And, if you want to read more about her house in France and its range of retreats, I wrote a full report for Queen of Retreats - read it here.

Oh, and if you fancy finding out more about my thoughts on the issue of 'home', you could always read my book Spirit of the Home.  Click on the cover for more.

Tarts or balls? A tale of two recipes

So, Adrian is off on his travels again (Belgium, Prague, London, St Albans), leaving James and I to our own devices.  This has, so far, involved finishing off The Walking Dead (we have agreed that maybe we need some lighter viewing having fought our blood-splattered way through a whole series in a few days) and eating Pecan and Chocolate tart. 

James made the latter as the last hurrah for his Duke of Edinburgh award and it is disgracefully good.  Okay, so the shop didn’t have pecans so he made do with walnuts and mixed chopped nuts but still…

Oh. You want the recipe?  Fair enough.   Here goes…

Pecan(ish) and Chocolate Tart

Rub together 120g chilled cubed butter with 165g plain flour and 25g ground almonds.  Stir in 55g castor sugar and then break a medium egg into the mix.  Work gently into a soft dough and tip onto a lightly floured surface and flatten (my grandmother would, of course, have washed her hands in cold water first, and used a slab of marble to keep it all cold).  Wrap in cling film and chill for three hours. 

Roll out pasty to about 3mm and line a greased 25cm tart tin.  Back into the fridge with the little bugger.  And we wonder why we all buy ready-made pastry?  

Now melt 80g dark chocolate and 45g of cubed butter in a bain marie (you know, a bowl suspended over a saucepan of simmering water).  In a separate saucepan combine 160g of granulated sugar and 235ml of golden syrup – stir like fury so it doesn’t catch until it is all melted.  Beat together three medium eggs and whisk into the chocolate/butter mixture until smooth.  Now fold in the hot syrup mixture, whisking all the while.

Add in a teaspoon of vanilla extract and 235g of nuts (ideally pecans but your choice – I’d probably eschew the mixed nuts but the walnuts are damn fine). 

Preheat oven to 180 degrees and put baking tray in for about five minutes to get hot.  Now place pastry case on the baking tray and pour over the nut and goo filling.  Bake for about 40 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is set.  Cool and eat.

Now then.  Yes, it tastes delicious but, for the love of all that’s sacred, will you just LOOK at those ingredients.  It’s sugar on sugar on sugar.  The nuts are a saving grace (the protein will slow down the sugar rush) but even so…  It has made my teeth sing and my pulse race and I've got the start of a killer headache.  

So, let’s find an alternative.  Something that is still really yummy but will actually help your body rather than sledgehammer it.  So I asked Gertrud for the recipe for the energy powerballs she serves as snacks at Yobaba Lounge (report coming soon on Queen of Retreats) and here it is…

Gertrud’s recipe for peanut butter, banana and honey powerballs

1 cup ground almonds

1 cup ground walnuts or hazelnuts

2 heaped tblsp crunchy plain peanut butter

1 heaped tblsp creamy honey (ideally not runny)

2 dried bananas, finely chopped

1 tsp cinnamon

Juice of half a small lemon

zest of half an orange (optional)

1/2 tblsp coconut oil (optional)

Sesame seeds

Mix together all of the ingredients (apart from the sesame seeds).  Don't be shy, get in there with your hands. Make sure the honey, peanut butter and coconut oil are well mixed in. The mixture should not be too wet or sticky, but hold together when you press it into form.  If it's too wet, just add ground almonds.  Form into balls (should get 20-30), roll in the sesame seeds. Put in the fridge for half an hour.

Inspiration: Instead of the 1 cup of ground walnuts or hazelnuts, you can add a mixture of milled seeds (sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seed). To mill the seeds, add them to your high speed blender, and shortly blast them at top speed. You can do the same with nuts if you don't have any ground. Add other dried fruits and flavours - Morello cherries with raw cacao works a treat!

So, there you have it.  Tart or ball?  Up to you.  Because there are always choices in life, huh? 

Holes - meditations on change and pain

You know what?  Right now I can barely type.  My arms feel as if they belong to someone else entirely.  Why?  Well, Nick, the instructor at my little local gym, had devised me a new set of programmes and today was my first upper body session.  I’m using mainly free weights now although he snuck in a killer series on the TRX.  Ouch.  Ouch. Ouch.

Anyhow, it’s all good.  No, I’m not a masochist, well, not more than anyone else really, but if you want to progress, you have to mix things up.  If you carry on doing the same thing, year in, year out, nothing changes. 

My routine was fine, nothing wrong with it, and it was keeping me at a base level of fitness.  But I wanted even firmer, leaner arms; I wanted a stronger back and abs.  So, then, I had to move out of my comfort zone into something…more challenging. 

Of course, this goes for anything in life really, not just fitness.  But change can be frightening.  It’s easy doing what we’ve always done, isn’t it?  Sure you can coast and, if you’re happy where you are, doing what you’re doing, then that’s all fine and dandy.  But if you’re not…well… You have to try something different.

And that reminded me of a poem Mangalo read out at the end of a yoga class at Yobaba Lounge.  I hadn’t heard it before and it made me smile.  It’s very simple (as the best things usually are) and it’s uncomfortably true. 

So, for all who find themselves in holes…here it is. 

There’s a hole in my sidewalk by Portia Nelson

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

I walk down another street.”

Mapping the Kabbalistic Tree of Life onto houses, as you do...

For the last ten years or so I have had this recurring dream.  I am in a large house.  It usually starts off being The Old Rectory, the first house we lived in when we moved from London, but then I realise there are parts of it I didn’t know were there.  I walk through whole wings, endless bedrooms, hidden corridors, dusty echoing spaces.  Firstly I feel overwhelmed.  How can I cope with all this?  And then comes a feeling of mounting dread.  There is some evil hidden away here, something that mustn’t be awoken.  The feeling intensifies and it becomes a nightmare – the kind that has one waking with a gasp, heart pounding, scrabbling for the light.

As I walked into Yobaba Lounge I felt a jolt.  This place.  What was it?  Then Gertrud gave me a tour of the whole house and I realised.  This was the place in my dream.  Or very close.  The house is vast, so vast Gertrud isn’t quite sure how many rooms there actually are.  ‘I think there were fifty originally,’ she says.  ‘But now, since we took out partitions and so on?  Who knows?’  Many have been beautifully restored but even more are still slumbering.  Some rooms you can’t even access – they are blocked up.  How weird is that? 

Now I’m fascinated by houses, by homes.  So much so that I wrote five books about them (well, six if you include the illustrated version of Spirit of the Home).  I firmly believe homes have personalities just as distinct as people’s.  Even new homes, brand new places, can’t help but be influenced by the land on which they are built; by their proximity to other places; by the layout of their rooms; by the direction in which they face.  The Chinese knew this and developed the art and science of feng shui to explain it.  The Indians knew it and developed Vastu Shastra for the same reasons.  I could go on, with examples from all the indigenous traditions of the world, but you get the picture.

This one had more than a personality; it had the resonance of a temple.  And, as I lay on the hammock, idly gazing back at the house, something struck me.  The main part with its three pillars mapped out the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.  Ten windows for ten sephiroth.  Except…it didn’t quite fit.  But then…doh…the bottom sephirah is Malkuth, the Kingdom, the realm of Earth.  So, go figure, Malkuth is the Earth, the ground on which the chateau sits.  And then it all fitted perfectly.  It links neatly with tantric yoga too – with its triangles pointing up (Shiva) and down (Shakti).  And I spun it round, so it became three-dimensional and then it became a Merkaba, a divine space-time ship.   Oh, I do so love this kind of playful mind game. 

This illustration of the Tree of Life shows it pretty clearly.  So, Malkuth (Malchut, the bottom red sphere) is in the Earth.  Da'at is the 'hidden' sephirah, known as 'Knowledge' - it corresponds with the Abyss that separates the lower spheres from the supernal triangle.

It’s pretty common to look at a house with an eye to the chakras (so downstairs rooms are lively and earthy and need equally punchy earthy colours – vibrant reds and sociable oranges and energising yellows).  As you move up to the next floor, more soothing balancing colours come in – blues or greens for sleeping.  And up the top, should one have space, is the ideal place for meditation rooms (in shades of violet, indigo or pure white).   So, no wonder that Gertrud and Mangalo had placed the yoga shala up at the top of the house – in Kether, the crown chakra – and no wonder it was such a peaceful space, conducive to deep states of meditation.

Does any of this matter?  No, not really.  Does it have a practical application?  Well, only in as far as one could work with the energy of the house, by boosting the energy of certain spaces.  But mainly, it’s just cosmic play. 

And, oh…my dream house?  I found out what had been hiding in the dark corners.  Am I brave enough to tell you?  I’m not sure. 

You can't tell the universe to piss off, can you?

Where were we?  Oh yes.  Sitting alone in Jane’s flat, talking to Prue.  Well, you know, for all I like my own company, sometimes I do get a bit lonely. And that week was very very strange. Okay, let's be honest, I was pretty low.  But you can't give up, right?  You can't just throw in the towel and...give up. Surely, I thought, there is some kind of balance?  Some way of living that lies between monastic solitude and…babble?  

And then an email pinged in.  Would I like to go to a yoga retreat in southern France?  I idly clicked on the website and…wow!  It looked stunning.  Stylish yet in an insouciant, easygoing way.  And...yoga and meditation and raw vegan food and sunshine and hammocks and snugly throws and fires and lakes and big baths and and and...

But…but…but… it was only a few weeks away and the calendar was, to my memory, busy, busy, busy.  Not with my stuff, I hasten to add, but Adrian’s.  And we make a point of always having one or other of us at home with James.  So I flicked through the pages of my diary and…well, well, well… that week was totally, perfectly, bizarrely clear.  But…but…but…I couldn’t afford the flight.  Except…oh my, I was being offered £50 towards travel and…would you believe it, there was a flight from Bristol for…yup… £50. 

Now, whether you believe in synchronicity or not; in Fate or not; in pure damn luck or not…there it was.  And, really, you can't tell the universe to piss off, can you?  It would be rude.  So I said Yes.  Of course I did.  But, by the time I got to Bristol airport I was wondering…why?  Why do I keep travelling?  Am I just running away?  Is it just distraction?  Of course.  In part.  But then again, I try to keep myself open to life, to new experiences, to different places and times and people.  It’s too easy to hide away.  In the mean time. 

So I flew to Toulouse. For, after all, there was nothing to lose.  And there, at the airport, was a woman with a sign.  

And we drove, fast, far, free…and then we arrived at a small bastide town, plunged down a narrow alleyway and parked by a big high wall by a river.  And Gertrud opened a door in the wall and I walked through…into another world, something rather magical.  Like Alice tumbling down her rabbit hole.  Like Tom waking into his midnight garden. Like Lucy plunging through the fur coats in the wardrobe...

I'll be writing up my full report on Yobaba Lounge for Queen of Retreats but...you know, sometimes it's hard to put things into words so I'm loosening up here.