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It’s easy, ANYONE can do this. We have a monthly grocery budget of $600. Every March, and sometimes later in the year, I institute Mai version of March madness by cutting our budget to $100 max for eggs, milk, fresh fruit and veggies. The rest of the time we live out of what’s in our fridge, freezer and pantry. It’s amazing how quickly that pot roast you got on sale at Costco gets put in the back of the freezer and forgotten.
You can adjust this to your needs. If your budget is a lot smaller, say $300 a month, I’d suggest that you set aside $50 to buy fresh produce, milk and eggs. If you have a garden and friends with fruit trees, you can cut it down to $25 for basics. Tailor it to fit you. What NOT to do:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwTAny1p1zkgMUclxyX_CVA The bite of wisdom offered here is: Use what you have, live within your means. My Grandma grew up very poor and was always saying "waste not want not". I love that because it follows what I believe is a spiritual law that nothing is wasted. I have been a Nurse for almost 30 years. I worked in the hospital, at the bedside, for 25 years. My last three years were in an outpatient setting, as a Nurse Case Manager. I have been honored and humbled to serve hundreds of people in their journey to wellness. I am proud to be a Nurse. Nurses are the backbone of patient care. We tirelessly give our heart and souls to our patients and our jobs. We also are notoriously known for putting everyone else first, at the expense of our health. I was in that club.
If you happen to be a Nurse, I honor you for the work you do. You make a difference. No one can truly know how hard it is to be a Nurse, unless you are a Nurse. One of my favorite Nursing jokes is as follows: A Recovery Room Nurse died and went to hell. It took her two weeks to realize she wasn't at work! LOL! To say it's a stressful job is an understatement. For years I have been feeling that something was missing in my life. I was not fulfilled in my job. I knew there was something more, something bigger I could be doing with my life. Have you ever felt that way? I wanted to leave my well-paying job as a Nurse and do what I loved. But fear and doubt kept me from taking the leap of faith. I was focused on paying the bills and being responsible. HOW would the bills get paid if I left my job? What about health insurance? Growing my 401K? Wasn’t I being selfish by wanting to live the life of my dreams? Then COVID hit. People I knew were dying. I turned 60. It made me reevaluate my life - what have I done with it? If I were to die, would I be proud of the life I had lived? The one word that welled up from taking stock of my life was MEDIOCRE at best. I re-read a book called Return from Tomorrow. It’s about a young service man, George Ritchie, who had a life after death experience. In it, he meets Christ. George was shown pictures from every moment of his life, and Christ asked him “What have you done with your life?” Whoa! Though it was the 5th time I read this book, that question hit me like a ton of bricks. It gave me my WHY, the reason to quit my job and start taking the steps toward my extraordinary life. Here is my why: I knew that if I were to die tomorrow, and my Savior asked me “what have you done with your life?”, I could not bear to look Him in the eyes and say “I haven’t done much, I lived in mediocrity, I did OK, but I buried the talents You gifted me with and let fear and doubt keep me from living the extraordinary life that You dreamt for me.” NO WAY!!!! My why gave me the strength to set a termination date from my well-paying, 401K- building, secure job. It's been eight months since I “retired”. It's been a journey! It took about five months before I could articulate what the something "more" I was supposed to be doing! I'm figuring out how to live an extraordinary and fulfilling life, and I want to share how to do it with you! It all starts with what we feed ourselves - our body, mind and spirit. I'm honored and humbled to have you here with me. I meditate every day. It feeds my soul and is part of my daily routine that contributes to living an extraordinary and fulfilling life.
After my meditation outside, I went into our home's dedicated Healing Room. I started out my conversation with God by telling Him that I was having difficulty believing in myself. Here is what He replied: "The part of you that you're doubting is the part of you that is God. If you doubt yourself, you doubt God." Whoa! There was no judgment in His message, just love and truth. His response gave me permission to think better, no - bigger of myself. It allows me to expand in to endless possibilities of growth, accomplishment, peace and happiness. We are all born of Creator. A good way to know if you are connected to Source is to notice how you are feeling. Wayne Dyer says it this way: If you are feeling good, you are feeling God. If you are feeling bad, you are not connected. This is such a simple way to keep us in the flow of abundance and health. Todays recipe to feed your Spirit:
Some of you may be old enough to remember a song by Jackie DeShannon with the above title. It came out in 1969. If you don't know the song, Google it. It has a sweet tune and wonderful lyrics.
What does that have to do with food? EVERYTHING!! As a fellow Foodie and Sustenance Seeker, I don't think that surprises you. I'm sure you have had people tell you that they could taste the love in the food you made, or you've experienced that yourself. There is a great show on Netflix called "Chef's Table". One beautiful Chef says that her intent is for the people who eats her food to be able to taste the love she puts into it. The Sous Chef for Niki Nakayma shared that the reason she worked with Chef Nakayma now was because, as a former patron of the restaurant, she could feel the amount of love that was put into the meals. Wow! That's powerful! Everything is energy. Every thing, color, word, sound, ingredient, has an energetic vibration that is felt and interpreted. Whether it is physical food or an emotion or thought, that energy is ingested by us. (I'll be doing a course on this topic in the next few months and will be sure to let you know when it's available.) So it's important to be very aware of what you are feeding yourself, holistically (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually). Today's recipe for delicious living:
My husband lived in Louisiana for five years and loves gumbo. I've never had it. He got a recipe from a friend's wife and yesterday was the fateful day I chose to make it. Oh boy. It was touted as an "easy" recipe. One look, and I knew it was not. That didn't intimidate me, I've been cooking for 50 years. My Achilles' heel was that I didn't know what it was supposed to taste like, other than "delicious". The recipe called for a jar of already made roux, which is basically flour and oil, cooked until brown. It's the base of the soup and a thickening agent as well. The premade roux was supposed to make the recipe easy and was "key" to getting the right taste. Originally my husband Steve was going to make the gumbo with my help. Steve has many wonderful skills and gifts, but cooking is not one of them, so he bought the roux and gumbo file (ground sassafras leaves) online. I thought I'd surprise him by having it made by the time he came home from work. I was so excited to make something that he loved and hadn't eaten for a long time. I started cooking at 1 pm. I re-read the recipe and enjoyed the enthusiasm of the woman who wrote it out for us. I could feel HER mouth watering as she put the recipe on paper. This added to my anticipation of a delicious meal. I got all the ingredients set out and started cooking the chicken and sausage as directed. I opened up the jar of roux. It was as dark as molasses, which was emphasized as the secret to getting that great taste. I tasted it - BLAAAH! My immediate reaction was "this tastes like burnt dirt!" DESPITE my 50 years of cooking experience, I IGNORED my gut reaction and thought, "well, maybe it's an acquired taste, and by the time all the ingredients were blended together, it will be good". Boy was I WRONG. Have you ever done something like that? Three hours later, after following the directions and adding some high quality smoked sausage and delicately seasoned chicken, I had a huge pot of soup that tasted like burnt dirt! I used all the tricks I could think of to make it taste better. But alas, I had chicken and sausage and mixture of other ingredients that took on the flavor of the rotten roux. :-( I woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning with the lessons of rotten roux ruminating in my mind. I got up at 4:30 to capture it here. Lessons learned from rotten roux:
As I was writing this, the idea of a recipe for "rotten roux redeemed" came up. I rinsed all the roux/soup off of the chicken, sausage and Cajun trilogy of celery, onions and bell peppers. I'm going to make a rockin' roux-less breakfast burrito for my husband. *see results in picture below - Steve loved it!)
Welcome, please pull up a chair and get comfortable. I hope you’re hungry, because you will ALWAYS find lots of delicious food at Mai table - food that nourishes body, mind and spirit.
May I share my journey to this moment with you? In 2019, when I was 59 ½, I started feeling a familiar, but more intense, gnawing in my gut that there HAD to be more to life than what I was experiencing. I knew that I was being called to do something “more”, but I just didn’t know what it was or how to access it. SOMETHING WAS MISSING. Have you ever had that feeling? To put it bluntly, I was miserable. I felt stuck. My job was not fulfilling. I wanted to retire early, but felt obligated to help pay our mortgage, college expenses for our daughter, and to provide medical and dental insurance for our family. Most days I cried the whole drive into work. As my 60th birthday approached, I reflected on my life. It was disheartening to realize it was mediocre at best - this added to my great discomfort and unhappiness. Was I being selfish for wanting something more? Months passed and I just kept living my life as I always had: I got up and went to work ,came home and made dinner, took a shower, went to bed and repeated it all over again. I was about to give up and acquiesce to a life of mediocrity when I saw something on FaceBook. It was an invitation from a guy named Tony Robbins to join a 4 day “Comeback Challenge”. At this point, it was 2020. COVID was in full swing and had turned the world upside down. I had heard about Tony before, but never read any of his books or attended any of his seminars. He was a Godsend! Those few hours a day really helped me to take charge and responsibility of my life. I knew I had some hard decisions to make. I set an early retirement date for July of 2021, just short of turning 61. This was a huge leap of faith. Many of my friends asked me why I just didn’t work a few more years, because I could get so much more money by doing so. Hear me now, the hardest thing for me was to put my emotional and mental health before making money. Let that sink in. Does it sound familiar? I knew that what was missing was ME! Me being my best self, and my best self needed to step up and take charge. How does this relate to food and Finding God in Gourmet? About 5 years ago I listened to a Ted Talk by Adam Leipzig on “How To Know Your Purpose in 5 Minutes”. I was able to articulate that one purpose was to connect others to God through food. I’ve always been a foodie. I don’t think you can grow up in Hawaii and NOT be a foodie. That’s when the idea of Finding God in Gourmet was “served” in my brain and here we are! It’s perfect because I was blessed with the gift of creating great meals and the hunger to seek sustenance from all sorts of food. I get fed through art, poetry, the colors of a sunrise, deep conversations... how about you? I'll bet that you are a spiritual foodie - a sustenance seeker too! As Jenna Kutcher says, I’m in the "messy middle" of figuring out how to live an extraordinary and fulfilling life. Mediocrity is no longer an option. I’ve dropped 35 pounds and have kept it off for over a year. I am happier now than I’ve ever been before. I feel free. I won’t lie, it’s not easy, extraordinary never is! But the satisfaction in striving to do and BE better is worth all the work! I want to share what I learn with you, so you can live an extraordinary and fulfilling life too. For me, and probably for you too, it all starts with food - what we feed ourselves physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. We are all born of Creator and therefore born to create. I LOVE creating and playing with the alchemy of fresh ingredients and exotic spices, with words, colors, sounds, scents, and silence, to produce magical meals that truly nourish your body, while giving you food for thought, and edifying your spirit. What? You haven’t had food like that? Then you are in the right place my fellow sustenance seeker! WELCOME TO MAI TABLE! The “recipe” to christen this first post is: How To Listen To Your Gut
*tip - you never quite feel done Remove from oven, but never let your aspirations cool Gremolata (topping) the Secret Sauce that Seals Success
Mix together and experience the alchemy of this recipe. Serves: thousands, starting with you, and then your family and then your friends and their families, and their friends. You get the idea. Following this recipe will change your life and make this a better world. *alchemy definition: a seemingly magical process of transformation and creation. That’s it for today. I hope this has fed you - all of the aspects of you that are hungry for delicious living. |
AuthorSpiritual Foodie, Chef, Holistic RN, Healer Archives
August 2024
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