Hey all, hope you have had a great holiday season, managed not to eat too much crap and got in plenty of socializing. We made it through without too much disruption to our GAPS diet. It isn’t easy to maintain your dietary guidelines under such exuberant hospitality that often occurs in these circumstances! I have been doing a lot of thinking, cooking, and cleaning lately hoping to get my home and mind organized to a degree where I can manage to juggle all the things I would like to do, finish and get involved in this year. In my house cleaning I pulled out a huge stack of papers, notes and other random collections that I have been wanting to post or tell you all about so I will be going through that soon. Beware — my postings may become even more random than ever – heh.

I was thinking of sending out a general newsletter, as I was surprised to get some takers when I offered it at the end of my December update last year. I think what I will do is to send out recipe postcards instead, to save on paper and postage. Please let me know if you are interested by friending me on facebook and sending me a message with your address, please put ‘newsletter’ in the subject line. I had to take down my contact form until I get the site updated as I get too much spam (yes we are still about to update the site to make it easier to find stuff!) I personally am a big fan of snail mail and I have been thinking of doing a quarterly recipe card mail-out or something, again let me know if you are interested.

I would like to focus on more community involvement this year and will be doing a guest blog at least once a week, I would love to hear your personal experiences with food so please feel free to send in an article, or even just a couple paragraphs, we’d love to hear from you, if possible, please try to include a photo as well :). As some of you may have noticed, I have been trying my hand at some of the bloghop or blog carnival techniques. Every Full moon and Dark moon, think of Hella Delicious and stop by the site to link up your favorite methods for detoxing or your favorite GAPS and/or SCD recipes and tips.

I have one more project under way, which I hope to have ready soon. I am putting together a DIY Basics to Urban Homesteading PDF file which will provide free information from people who have figured out some interesting ways to survive city life as healthily as possible. I will have things like basic recipes for home-made cosmetics, tips for reducing electro-magnetic frequencies, therapies and body-movement, music, and many practical recipes and how-to for shopping, pets etc. etc. If you would like to submit an article to this please contact me. An example of the sort of thing I am thinking of is the Nettle Soup Ezine, although the format will have to be a bit different as I would like to make it easily printable, to be used as a reference for folk who don’t like computer’s that much.

I have so many things I want to post right now that I don’t even know where to get started. I am still behind in posting recipes as well! If anyone would like to just help out with Hella Delicious in general–like with twitter, facebook or posting articles or anything else! Please contact me, I can’t pay at the moment, but I desperately need some help and intend to start paying someone as soon as I can. Thanks again, for all the comments and encouragement these past few years, you guys have really helped me with your interest and open-mindedness, I know I like to get carried away and talk a little crazy sometimes, so thanks for sticking with me! Most of you have probably figured out by now that I like to talk with my tounge in my cheek and that I hope most of what I say is taken with a grain of salt and gets people curious enough to look into it themselves a bit more 🙂

May 2011 be the year we take back our land, defend our Earth, Water and Air and no longer put up with any more excuses. We can live in a much more sustainable way right now. There are plenty of people who are already doing it. I realized talking to my mother this Christmas that one of the reasons people seem to get offended and shut-down when I start talking to them about the terrible things in the water, food, etc, is that they don’t know of the various movements, small and large that are already in place, building a better world.

I know exactly how distressing and depressing it is and how powerless it can make us feel with all the nonsense in our world and the unbelievable things that technology has allowed to make happen. So I don’t blame anyone, but we have to go through that pain and we have to feel it. The learning curve is painful, it always is that is nothing new. There are many different ways to live a good life that doesn’t cause damage to the earth, people, plants and animals around you. If we just take one aspect of our life at a time and work to change our lifestyles step by step in this manner we will be surprised at the results and how GREAT it makes us feel.

This is a very inspiring example of one lady who is living her life in a down to earth and healing manner. She lives in Olympia and makes incredible calendars (and a cute cookbook too): Ladies and Gentlemen, Nikki McClure…

Nikki McClure by Dicky Dahl from PatCastaldo on Vimeo.