Baked Seabass & Sun Dried Tomatoes

Serves 4

Ingredients

2 Fillets of Seabass

100g of Sun Dried Tomatoes

1/2 a lemon

1 small finely chopped onion

Salt and Pepper to season

Fresh mixed herbs

cooking string

Creamy Mushroom & Nut Soup

Felling  little nutty this week? Just fancy trying something new? Well we’ve got nuts, tasty mushrooms and a whole lot of foodie love!

Serves 4

Ingerdients

30g of butter

1 leek, sliced

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

Hand full of sage leaves

500g of mushrooms, sliced

100g of chopped, mixed nuts

600ml of vegetable stock

2 tbsp of soy sauce

200ml of double cream

50ml Creme fraiche

1tbsp chopped chives

Site: Morguefile
Photographer: Mconnors[gallery link="file" order="DESC" columns="2"]

Ingredients

225ml 8fl oz carrot juice
½ tsp dried thyme
good pinch of cayenne pepper
100g 3½oz quick-cooking pearl barley
3 tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tbsp linseed oil
1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
200g 7oz diced fresh tomatoes
1  diced avocado

Source of Inspiration:

We’ve been absent for a while but we’re getting back into the swing of things and we thought we’d start off with some yummy edible treats!

All of the Recipes featured in Recipe of the Week are sourced from around the web and tried and tested by us to make sure they’re as yummy as the pictures look. Regrettably our versions never look as tasty so we’ll stick with the pictures we find for now!

So take a look at this weeks recipe, try it out and let us know what you think!

Feeling Hungry? Thank Fish its Friday!!!

Serves 2

Ingredients

2 Fresh Tuna Steaks

4 large sprigs of Cauliflower

4 large sprigs of Broccoli

Greek Yoghurt

Chopped Chives

Chopped Spring Onions

2 slices of lemon

2 slices of orange

2 tbsp Cayenne Pepper

This week I’ve been feeling soulful, reflective and emotionally relaxed. I thought I would share one of my favourite songs with you Terri Walker- I AM. I love this song! It is a beautiful melody of self assurance and empowerment. Every woman should add it to her playlist. The one you listen to along with Corrine Bailey Rae- Put Your Records On , where you pretend its a hot summer day and you’re relaxing in the park, those days when you imagine your life is like a movie. For me that’s at least every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The aim of today’s posts is to spread a little happiness, encourage a little self searching. I want you to follow Jill Scott’s lead and Live life like it’s golden . Some days we wake and happiness just consumes us regardless of the troubles our ovaries and wombs plan to throw at us as the day goes on. If you woke up feeling that happiness today then enjoy the songs and spread a little happiness around the office, the lecture theater  the queue at Subway while you’re ordering your chicken teriyaki with sweet onion sauce. Ignore the sob story your uterus is trying to ply you with and share the love!!

Nothing is better than some real, down to earth, self love converted into shared love. It feeds to souls of women everywhere. That massage that you thought about getting. Go get that. Those new shoes? GO BUY THEM. That piece of cake? I don’t have to tell you twice to GO EAT THAT!! Indulge, invest in and inspire yourself today. If you don’t nobody else will.

GO AND BE A THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VERSION OF YOURSELF YOU CAN BE TODAY*

(because let’s be honest we don’t all look that great first thing before 9am)

* If in doubt, refer to the rule: what would Oprah do?

Happy Tuesday Superwomben!

My first fable is The Farmer and the Snake. The story goes a little something like this..

 ONE WINTER a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion on it, and taking it up, placed it in his bosom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and resuming its natural instincts, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound. "Oh," cried the Farmer with his last breath, "I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel."

 The moral of the story: The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.

Sometimes I feel as though my ovary is the ungrateful snake. I feed her with yummy greens like broccoli and spinach,. You know...the stuff that we all pretend to love but really, unless its deep fried, never tastes as good as a steak in peppercorn sauce with sauté potatoes.  

*wipes dribble off laptop*

I exercise for a minimum of 1 hour everyday, I admit sometimes it's a brisk walk, others its a full on Xena Warrior Princess attack of resistance training and rowing machines at the gym. But the point is I do the exercise, trying to motivate her, keep her preppy and feeling good. Letting her share in the joy that is post workout endorphins. 

I let her relax every night with a hot bath. I mean I go all out, candles, bubbles, music... the whole nine yards, and still it seems like she doesn't appreciate what I do for her. She still gives me a sharp stab in the side every now and again to remind me that she is not happy. 

I already know she dislikes internal examinations, so does her bosom buddy (my cervix). Between them both they are cranky and somewhat unreliable. You can never tell what kind of mood they will be in. They appear to be ungrateful snakes...but I am a faithful farmer and so I shall continue to do right by them, living in hope that they will eventually yield to the goodness of vitamins and the healing powers of superfoods, a healthy lifestyle and the occasional sweet and sour fish with egg friend rice from the chinese. 

So for all the farming superwomben out there...keep on at it, plough the land (and no that is not a euphemism for sex, although that's nice too...good exercise and all that jazz). Even if your uterus and its neighbours are not thanking you kindly today, the rest of your body is! So go eat some brocolli!

And no it doesn't count if you dip it in chocolate.

xx Saschan xx

Reference: http://www.aesopfables.com

Image: http://gardenofeaden.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/what-is-worlds-most-poisonous-snake.html

Suzanne Moore

The Guardian, Wednesday 20 February 2013 19.28 GMT

Extending IVF for older women obscures a deeper problem for society

Why do we make it so difficult for women to provide for children when they are most biologically able to have them?

It sounds like good news, doesn’t it? Easier access to IVF on the NHS: available after two years instead of the three years of ovulation kit-style compulsory sex. The new Nice guidelines also recommend extending the age limit for IVF from 39 to 42. I am all for choice. If feminism means anything to me, it means extending women’s choices, but as many healthcare trusts wont pay for this, what is being offered here?

Infertility as a “disease”, the NHS accepting everyone’s “right” to reproduce – these are big issues that I, as a mother (or a “grow bag”, as one of my friends lovingly called me), have no right to discuss. Still, are my taxes to fund the plight of the childless? Actually, in the same way they must fund the obese, the smokers, the drinkers – yes, they should. Better than funding missiles, not that we are given the choice.

Still, I have reservations. In my own circle I have seen the toll IVF takes. When it works, it is worth all the money, the increased cancer risk and the torment of sending a woman’s body into menopause and whooshing up again to maximum fertility. For there is the cherished miracle child.

When it doesn’t – the cycles of hope and despair, the news that the embryos are not quite up to scratch, the dawning realisation that there will be no baby even though you have spent your life savings – it is unbearable. So, before the NHS offers three cycles of IVF, let’s be clear on the success rates. On the whole, only one in four NHS trusts offer it and each cycle costs £3,000. One in seven couples are now said to havefertility problems. Men’s fertility issues often remain unexplained. It is the women who go through the process, after all. The success rates for IVF for women age 38-39 is 19.3%. For women from 40 to 42 it is 12.5 %. For those aged 43-44 it is 4.9%. In other words, IVF is not a hugely successful treatment and the cost, both financial and emotional, is huge.

But surely there are some bigger questions to be asked here, and they are not about science but society. Why are women having babies later? Is this an actual choice? Or an economic necessity? Does having your first child at 40 change how you parent? Why do we live in such a way that those without kids do not encounter small children? Even writing that sounds paedophilic; I simply mean it is possible to extend out from the nuclear family, for adults and children to interact beyond a parental relationship.

I am not at all surprised, though, that more women are choosing to remain child-free as it is obvious there is less and less support. As childcare costs soar and two wages are needed to support a family, some kind of reproductive strike happens. Look at the plummeting birth rate in Italy, for instance. I was indeed lucky to have my last child at 42 as I had lost a fallopian tube during an ectopic pregnancy. The surgeon who saved my life – I had already fallen in love with him as a result – told me he could help me out if I had difficulty conceiving. He often helped, he explained, his female colleagues when they had difficulties getting pregnant. They didn’t want that until they were consultants, which was when they were about 38. I stopped myself screaming “Impregnate me now” and managed to get pregnant the “normal” way. But then I had had my first child relatively young and I see now that my daughter’s generation are holding back, waiting for some secure employment before they can even think about it.

So we are completely split on the subject of the “right” time to have a baby. There isn’t one. Teen pregnancies are bad. Older women having babies is a bit yucky. But women in their mid-30s are just hitting their stride professionally and don’t want to stop. Kate Middleton is the perfect age, but she doesn’t have a job. The only people who appear to have babies when they want to are the very rich and very poor. For everyone else it’s a struggle.

The idea that offering IVF gets round these fundamental societal shifts is bogus. It is simply part of the privatisation of areas of our “family” life. Of course, women who do not have children have fulfilling and wonderful lives. It has always been so. The notion of the pitiful childless woman is indeed strange when we are continually fed stories of fecund underclass females who breed willy-nilly to get council-built castles.

The divide between parents and non–parents is supposedly a stumbling block for any kind of sisterhood, but I have found it to also be a myth largely propagated by the right, who replace the notion of equality with the nastiness of envy. The discussion about at what age IVF becomes pointless is one for the doctors. For me, the much more important one is why do we produce a society that makes it so difficult for women to provide for children when they are most biologically able to have them?

Something has gone very wrong here and it is not to do with the quantity of women’s eggs. This is about the quality of women’s lives.

Reference: The Guardian

It is coming up to the 2 year anniversary of my surgery (May 5th) and ever since that fateful day my life has been blessed by some many wonderful people and wonderful things happening to me, but inspite of all the loveliness that came from my “take a break- tragedy to triumph” life story my remaining ovary refuses to participate in the celebratory atmosphere that I am trying to foster in my daily living. It continues to viciously assault me when it feels life is going to well and I’m too happy. It is not a gentle reminder not to over exert myself and get carried away on the silver linings I have discovered through The WombRoom, instead it is a brutal assault on my happiness and progress.Every now and then it just starts a war, a heavy artillery, bloody war. That is not a metaphor for a painful period.

I have had countless scans since my surgery and yet there appears to be no consistent pattern or findings devolved from these intrusive and often uncomfortable inspections. WHY OVARY?! WHY MUST YOU PLAGUE ME SO?!

Alas I refuse to allow my ovary to defeat me. I have come this far dragging it along with me as it kicks and screams and rallies my uterus into joining in its battle against me. Like a screaming child in the isles of a supermarket, my ovary has made me blush, caused me to publicly make excuses for its sudden temper tantrums and the consequent impact that this has had on my ability to perform in many areas of my life. In following with my analogy, I shall be a responsible parent. I will not give into its demands, to frolick in laziness and rest for 365 days of the year. That is exactly what it wants me to do. Instead I shall make it strong, I will tell it to grow a pair and act like an ovary should. To eat its fruit and vegetables, do its daily exercise and gets some proper sleep to aid its recovery because nobody ever heard of a lazy superwomban.

My next scan is in April… Here’s hoping there is good news…

xx Saschan xx

Image: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/meanwhile%20in%20my%20uterus

For years now, I’ve moan, complained, verbally abused and emancipated my uterus monthly without a second thought. Not once did I think about what she means to me, the part which she plays in my life as woman. I took my uterus for granted and one day, without any prior notice or warning, in my moment of melancholy she packed up her eggs, tied her tubes and walked out on me. 

A month went by and there was no sign of my period, at first I didn’t think much of it, I’d just assumed my cycle was changing. Then another month went by and then another. That was the moment I realised she’d left… the heifer left me high and dry ! (pun intended) At that point panic set in and all I could think of was the 7 children I probably wasn’t going to have with the husband I hadn’t met yet. What was going to happen to the list of baby names I had saved in my notes ? I would have to re-evaluate everything, EVERYTHING! So of course I turned to the closest thing to God I know.. Google.. because as we know Google is all knowing and all powerful. I read horror story after horror story and in that time another month went by. 

I finally decided to seek medical advice from someone other than Web-MD. So I told my doctor my tale of woe, and of course the first thing he asked me was “are you pregnant? ” followed by “is there a chance that you could be pregnant?….. have you taken a test” After 10 minutes of going around in circles I went ahead and urinated in the damn cup only for him to tell me I wasn’t pregnant… really ?!. We spoke for a while after that, I went through all my reservations and self diagnosis courtesy of Google and of course he dispelled them all. In his opinion it was perfectly normal and possibly a result of the stress from the changes that were happening or had happened in my life. It will come back, he said.. wait till after 6 months and if nothing happens comes back for further tests. 

Another month went by and at this point I’d completely given up on my uterus, she deserted me.. left me, she’d rejected me and denied me of my tribe of children. I was done! 

A few days ago I started getting pains, straight away I knew it, I knew she was back but I was scared to say it out loud. Then on Monday the flood gates opened! I’ve never been so happy to see the sight of my period! For the first time in my life the feeling of having a pack of new born wolves ravaging through my insides felt so euphoric!  

And that my friends brings us to the end of my story, my uterus left me for 6 months straight only to return again. Has this happened to anyone before ? 

Source: @Neffyfrofro