Quinn McDonald's Blog, page 18

Let There Be Cheesecake!

Cheesecake. I’ve had a long and sticky love affair with it. New York style, creamy, fluffy, mousse-y, chocolate, tofu (not for me), no-bake–there are as many cheesecakes as dessert lovers in the world.

I decided to play around with a cheesecake recipe that’s been in my recipe box for over 25 years. The original recipe was loaded with sugar and had a crust with flour. My way of cooking is by taste and feel, so I launched into the experiment with a grin and a spatula.

When I published the photo on Facebook, I got several requests for the final recipe, so here is Version 1.4–the fourth try from the original recipe. It’s a creamy, dense, firm, tart cheesecake with a pecan crust.

About variations: Feel free to experiment. I use full-fat dairy products because low-fat contains ingredients that make products taste gummy to me. Your experience may vary.

Diabetic-Friendly Cheesecake.  Time: 3.5 hours. Active time: 30 -45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 325ºF. This recipe was made in a 6-inch springform pan. Because you can’t turn out a cheesecake the way you can a regular cake, I’d suggest using a springform pan. I’ve never made it in anything else.

Crust Ingredients

1 cup pecan pieces (or mix of walnut or pecans)
2 tsp. cardamom
1 tsp. coconut blossom sugar, a low-glycemic sugar, light brown in color
2 tsp. butter

Put nuts in blender and blend on lower speed until they are the consistency of cornmeal. Do not over-blend, or you will have pecan butter. Add the rest of the ingredients except the butter and pulse to combine completely.

Melt the butter and use it to butter the bottom and sides of the pan. Leave in any excess. It helps crisp the crust.

Press the nut mass into the bottom and about 1/2-inch up the side of the pan. This seals the pan bottom to the side, so the liquid mixture won’t leak.

Put the pan on a cookie sheet and bake in a 325ºF oven for about 20 minutes. You want the crust to be slightly darker, but watch it carefully so it doesn’t burn. Remove and let cool completely. Do not add cheesecake mixture to a hot pan.

The break in the center doesn’t bother me and it doesn’t alter the taste.

Cheesecake Mixture Ingredients

1/3 cup cream cheese
1 cup yogurt
1/3 cup sour cream
1/3 cup cottage cheese
1 Tbl. lemon juice, squeezed from a lemon, not bottled
2 whole eggs
1 Tbl. coconut blossom sugar
2 tsp. coriander powder
2 tsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. vanilla
2 tsp. cornstarch

Put the cream cheese, lemon juice, zest and vanilla into a blender and combine to creamy consistency. Add the sugar. Blend. This sugar takes a little longer to incorporate and will turn the cake mixture a pale caramel color.

Stir the cornstarch and coriander into the yogurt, then add the yogurt to the blender. Mix at medium speed for about 15 seconds. Add the sour cream and cottage cheese, blending between each. Taste. Adjust sugar to taste if you don’t have to watch sugar intake.

Add eggs and blend until the mixture is perfectly smooth and evenly colored. Pour into the baked shell still in the pan. Put pan on cookie sheet and bake at 325ºF for about 30 minutes, or until a one-inch edge (from pan rim to center) is firm. The center will still be liquid. Turn off the oven and leave the cheesecake in the oven for another hour. Don’t peek or the oven will cool too quickly. Remove the cheesecake and allow it to cool completely. A toothpick will not come out clean, but don’t worry. Refrigerate for at least two hours. When the cake is cool, run a knife around the inside edge of the pan, release the springform ring, and cut the cake. Enjoy!

You can top the cheesecake with whipped cream or with a low calorie jam (see top photo).

Note: The cake is not a low-calorie dessert. It is diabetic friendly. Diabetes is a different disease for everyone, so watch your blood sugar, and remember that one serving is 1/8 of the cake, made in a 6-inch springform pan. I don’t know the carb count on it, all I know is that my blood sugar stays within reasonable limits if I eat if after a reasonable meal. (My reasonable meals contain 35 gr. carbs).

–-Quinn McDonald loves to cook food that tastes good. She learned how to cook from her mother, and can make a wicked good gravy from scratch.

Filed under: Food & Recipes Tagged: cheesecake, diabetic dessert, diabetic-friendly cheesecake

New Year, New Journal?

Now that you’ve slept in, recovered and started the year, should you start a new journal? Should you continue in the one you already have? How about the ones that have three pages filled in and abandoned?

Maybe a journal is too ambitious, too much work, not interesting. In that case, you might want to consider some other choices:

Write yourself a letter, summing up 2014 and writing down what you want for 2015. Write down the big, crazy things you can never have and the small, pointy things you want but are afraid to own.  You only have to do this once a year. Put it in an envelope and put the envelope in your underwear drawer so you can find it again. Read it every now and then.

Whenever you feel ambitious, read through it and decide if you want to take a step toward one of the things you want. Figure out the smallest possible step that would move you toward it. As Martha Beck says, “Got it? Good! Now you can take steps to make it happen. And as you take one step toward the thing you want, it really does take a hundred steps toward you.”

Tear out the few pages in each of the many journals you started but never finished.  Staple them together, with a blank page in front and back and write the dates of the pages on the blank page. Put them in a drawer where you will see them. When you feel like it, write some comments in a different colored ink–what was right, what you see now that you didn’t see before.

Get a three-ring binder or other easy-to-keep folder with standard-size

The original cool calendar page. Just a year ago, a lot of people were convinced we’d all be dead by now. That’s a good idea to review and see how thinking changed. And where are those people now?

pages so you never have to do more than print out your writing and put it in the folder. Add the date.  Don’t worry if you don’t do it often. Here are some things you can keep track of.  Imagine if you had kept track of interesting things for the last five years. You’d have fun comparisons and get new ideas.

Make a list of phrases you started using in the last three years. Cray-cray, bae, awesome sauce, totes. Where did you hear them first? Why did you start to use them? How do they make you feel when you use them? When others use them?

Make a list of phrases you would like to ban from the world. (See above). Why are you tired of them? What do they mean to you now? What changed?

The purpose of a journal is not to burden you by tracking every thought or action. The purpose of a journal is to help you figure out why you think, act, and dream the way you do. And then do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. That’s all. Keeping a journal not a religion, shouldn’t be a burden, and only works if you work at it and find it worthwhile.

If you decide to keep a journal, here are five things you can put on the first page. If you think those are lame, here are five different ideas for your first journal page.  And if you are afraid of making a mistake in your journal, here are some ways of fixing messed-up journal pages.

-–Quinn McDonald keeps a journal, but not everyday. Enough to keep track of the person she is evolving into.

Filed under: Art in Progress, Creativity, Journal Pages, The Writing Life Tagged: changing habits, journaling, new habits, old habits, why keep a journal

2015: So Far, a Mystery

A New Year has a big burden to bear. We don’t know what will happen, so we make stuff up. Many people want it to be a better year than 2014. Bad things happen every year, but at New Year, we hope to dodge anything awful.

Yes, sorrow, loss, and disappointment are tough in the short term, but perhaps not in the long term. My editor, Tonia Jenny, has an interesting post on sorrow and loss:

We cling to joy because we are afraid of what’s in the dark. But it’s the rich depth of all experiences that create such beautiful life stories. It’s because we know what fear, anxiety, frustration and hopelessness feel like that we relish peace, calm, flow and the excitement of optimistic anticipation. And here’s the real kicker: without occasionally feeling what we view as negative emotions we forget the difference; we take joy and calm for granted and we get bored.

We should not expect to be happy, satisfied, or content all the time. It’s the distance between joy and sorrow that measures the depth of our satisfaction.

After I gave up eating sugar (because I had to, I certainly didn’t want to), my taste buds gradually adjusted to the natural sweetness in foods.  When a restaurant was out of tea, and their water tasted like a public pool in July, I decided to drink a diet soda for the first time in years.

Once, I drank six diet sodas a day,  my first at breakfast. I anticipated the taste memory and was horrified at what I swallowed. It tasted chemical, cloyingly sweet and completely undrinkable. I would have never noticed that–or stopped longing for it– if I had not given it up.

Last night we had a hard freeze in the desert. As I write this, I don’t know which of my plants will survive. The agaves, filled with sap, will be the first to freeze. I may lose half of my plants. I may lose the oranges, if not the tree.

The loss of pain is necessary, but it’s never welcomed. If nothing else,

A cactus protected from freezing weather. Sort of.

plants are expensive to replace. But it’s more than that for me. I take care of my plants, know their weaknesses and the deep joy they bring. They signal the subtle change of seasons for me. They are living representations of the reason I came to Phoenix: warm weather, lots of light, and a certain dependence on the vagaries of nature.

Still, if you live in the desert, you expect loss. True, you expect it in the summer, but it is no less for coming on New Year’s Eve.

As we slip into 2015, I hope to be mindful of every joy and tend to every loss as carefully as my plants. There is new growth in every loss.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer living in the Sonoran desert. She is a naturalist and a life coach, often for humans.


Filed under: Creativity, idea boosts, Nature, Inside and Out Tagged: 2015, dealing with loss, dealing with sorrow, loss, New Year's 2015

New Year’s Eve, Almost 2015

Calendars are about to expire, new ones flip into place. As you get older, time moves faster. In 2014, some months zipped by, others dragged.

Seeing these clouds tonight means a change in the weather tomorrow. Rain, most likely

What’s interesting about a calendar is that it does more than mark time, it can set the pace.

January and February, lacking big holidays, can drag by because it is also dark and cold (in the Northern hemisphere.)

I remember clearly living in New England and celebrating the mid-February day when I arrived home without turning on my headlights. It was a cause for celebration.

If you keep a journal, you might make some interesting notes today. The mileage on your car–next year, you can see how far you’ve come.  The price of a gallon of gas, a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs. Those items rise and fall and it’s interesting to see if you can find any connections. It’s also interesting to stick a photo of yourself or your family into the journal at the end of the year.

When I was in graduate school, I read the diaries of hundreds of immigrant women from the 1890s. They told about their ordinary days, but finding the descriptions of what life was like, what bread cost, how dress hems got muddy because there weren’t storm sewers–or sidewalks–made for interesting reading.

In those diaries were real stories–and real history. Personal stories about historical events. Without that information, I would have never been able to write a dissertation. Understood the world as I find it now. Some of their wisdom is still with me.

For now, write down the things you want to leave behind in 2014. You don’t need to bring everything along into 2015. Pack light, but bring dancing shoes. It’s going to be that kind of year.

—Quinn McDonald is looking forward to 2015.

 

Filed under: Creativity, Nature, The Writing Life Tagged: change of weather, change of years, New Year's 2015

Keeping a Journal

Does keeping a journal require keeping the journals?

Do you keep your journals? When one is done (or filled), where do you store it? Do you ever go back and look at them? What are you doing differently in your life than you did 10 years ago? What are you doing that is the same?

A journal will hold your grudges for you so you can get on with your life. A journal will hold your worries, so you don’t have to let them circle your mind. A journal will hold your big goals, so you can keep following them.

But a journal that gets filled and stuffed in a box and put in the attic–that journal might as well be a cannoli for all the good it is doing you.

Journals are like computers–they hold information, but the genius comes in interpreting the information. Learning from it. Acting on it.

Treasure your old journals. They show how far you have come.

–-Quinn McDonald keeps a journal. It talks back to her.

Filed under: Journal Pages, The Writing Life Tagged: how to store your journal, keeping a journal

The Magic Week

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a magic one. Work is slow, often slow enough to enjoy some reading, planning, thinking time. An excellent time to take a look at your plans for 2015. I’m against making New Year’s resolutions, for three simple reasons:

How to protect a cactus from a freeze. The secret is knowing what will save a plant and what wastes time and materials. Planning for 2015 uses the same rules.

1. They are generally too big or too vague to succeed. (I want to eat a healthy diet; I want to lose 20 pounds, I want to have a better relationship with X.)

2. There are no how-to steps or plans to break the task from bigger to smaller steps. Nothing fails faster than a big plan with no small victories and check-in days.

3. There is no support system. Unless you enroll a support system, your family and friends will not want you to change. When you change, they will also have to change, and they didn’t sign up for that. They will send you change-back messages until you cave and give up.

So what to think about 2015? Start with things that worked well for you in 2014.

We all meet dips in our lives. We don’t always get warnings.

A relationship that went well. A success at work. A goal you met. Anything that worked well. Write it down. Describe it in detail. Celebrate your success. Continued success is built on previous, recognized, success.

Next, look at where you started in 2014 and how far you have come. Overcoming difficulties. Skirting tough times with grace. OK, without grace, but with persistence. Looking back to see how far you have come is a necessary step to keep moving ahead.

It’s tempting to think of the person you would like to be in 2015. Even more tempting to make it a whole new person. But it’s far more worthwhile spending your time finding yourself than trying to be someone new.

–Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach, writer, and business trainer who is planning for 2015 in a week that also includes a lot of reading and sleeping.

 

Filed under: Art/Freelance Biz, Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: marketing plan, moving into 2015, resolutions

Giving and Withholding

There it was on my Facebook feed–another “friend” invitation from someone I don’t know. That isn’t unusual, and most of the people I follow on FB are people I do not know in person. Still, we all have some connection–writing, sketching, collage, some worked at companies I’ve worked at. It’s comfortable–I don’t post super-personal information. It’s not the people, it’s FB itself that makes me leery.

What made this different is that within minutes of accepting the friend request, I received another request: to “like” their business page, to join their private group, and for two of them, to contribute to their private fund-raiser.

It confused me. Receiving a friend request is not being invited to someone’s house, but it also seems awkward to ask someone for money you have just friended on Facebook. And yet, I have given money to total strangers–the homeless begging at the side of the freeway or in front of stores. So why not on Facebook?

Because there is no personal contact. One person friended me, then immediately sent me a private message wishing me Merry Christmas.  Immediately after that came a request for medical expense money for his family. The photo could be any family, anywhere. The need could have been real, the request legitimate.

The homeless I give money to are people I “know”–also in a different way. I see the same people on the same corners. Tenuous as it is, it is a face-to-face transaction.

No matter what business you are in–from selling your ebooks to your art to your services–the personal connection is the one that will work. But it has to be real. Once people experience you, your service, your offer, your real work, there is something to react to. It can’t be an instant, one-way tag-game for the soft touch. That has never worked, and it won’t work just because FB makes it easier to connect.

–Quinn McDonald is a life coach and an instructor. She knows the value of relationships.

 

Filed under: Art/Freelance Biz, Creativity, In My Life, Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: asking for money, Facebook, strangers and friends

Letting Go of 2014

It doesn’t matter if it was a great year or a tough year. Probably some of both. Either way, in a week it will be 2015. And you can choose what to take with you and what to leave behind. Yes, you can. This is not up to your partner, or your parents, or what happened in 1974. It’s your choice.

Letting go means not dragging the worry and tension with you into a new year. Letting go means exhaling and waiting to pull in new air into your life and lungs.

Letting goes means leaving behind. Things that aren’t useful. Things that drag you down. Things that hold you back.

You get to choose priorities. You get to name what it important to you. No one can decide for you. You can’t claim it is important and then turn your back on it. Then it wasn’t important enough.

One year from now, you will not remember if you started the year with clean floors, dusted furniture, or a put-away tree. But you will remember your creative work. The work that expressed who you choose to be. The creative urge you followed that made 2015 different from 2014.

Start to let go of what isn’t make you eager, alive, wonderful and awake. You have a bit less than one week.

-–Quinn McDonald is starting to let go.

 

 

Filed under: Coaching, idea boosts, Opinion Tagged: 2014, creative work, ending 2014, letting go

Starfish on Christmas

This is a time of year for stars and dreaming. And also, realistically, a time that is not always easy. I love this gentle and mysterious poem for Christmas Day.

Poem: “Starfish”

Eleanor Lerman, from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds.

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to

the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a

stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have

your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman

down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,

the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,

is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the

pond, where whole generations of biological

processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds

speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,

they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old

enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?

There is movement beneath the water, but it

may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the

years you ran around, the years you developed

a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,

owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are

genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have

become. And then life lets you go home to think

about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one

who never had any conditions, the one who waited

you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that

you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,

so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you

were born at a good time. Because you were able

to listen when people spoke to you. Because you

stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your

late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And

then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,

while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,

with smiles on their starry faces as they head

out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

—Quinn McDonald dreams of stars.

Filed under: Nature, Inside and Out, Poetry Tagged: love what you have, mystery of life, real life, starfish

All Is . . .What?

It’s December 24th. There is a fever pitch of last-second shopping, traffic, forced cheer, disappointment, anger, and frustration. I know, I went to pick up my repaired suitcase and ran into it all.

I have a suggestion: if it’s not purchased, let it go.

If it’s not decorated, leave it the way it is.

If it’s not wrapped, and you still have wrapping paper, you can make a gift bag from wrapping paper. Otherwise, leave it unwrapped.

If it’s not a perfect dinner, eat what tastes good to you today.

Haven’t sent your cards? Me, neither. Send ‘em later or not at all. Or send ecards. Or write a letter in the next few days to people you really care about.

The important thing is–striving and stress will not bring about the magic of any holiday. Lower your standards. Have some tea. Eat a cookie. Breathe.

Enjoy the art of Toshio Ebine, some of which are shown here. Breathe. You are alive. You’ll never get today back. Stop ruining it with “less than” comparisons. Enjoy who you are and what you have. It is enough. You are enough.

—Quinn McDonald will leave the mantel the way it is–no pine boughs. Because it’s fine the way it is.

Filed under: idea boosts, In My Life, Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: night before Christmas, relax, take it easy