Learn to Properly Use Your Body When You Garden - Workshop This Weekend

"Lift with your legs!" Your legs, not your back!" "Stop!!" "There you go again, lifting with your back!" my father yelled at me almost daily when I worked alongside him on our farm. I was young and only half-listened, even though he'd had more than one hernia and I'd attended him after a painful surgery to repair one. I was a snotty teen who thought she knew more than the next person and my body could take relentless pounding in my youth and always seemed to recover.

Not so as I've aged, things are different. When I garden, and exert myself, I feel it. When I do something wrong, I know it -- sometimes for a month or more! Injuries can happen quickly in the garden, especially when you're tired.

Just three weeks ago I became unsteady and stepped backwards onto rusty shears and spent my Sunday afternoon getting a tetanus shot rather than completing a bed. And a few months ago, Chris injured his foot while digging holes to plant fruit trees, and gave himself a plantar fasciitis injury, (from stepping on the wrong part of his foot when he pushed the shovel into hard ground), that has yet to fully heal. And sometimes I spend so much time bent over weeding or planting that I feel like the "crooked little man who walked a crooked mile" that straightening out takes a while and I wonder if I'll ever be fully upright again!

Enter Ann of Love House Dahlias who recently sent me an email about a class she's having on her farm. I had the pleasure to write about Ann's magical dahlia farm for Ventana Monthly about a year ago. With thousands and thousands of holes that must be dug yearly for dahlias and plants that are weeded and tended, as well as her own tentative back she must watch out for, she knows a thing about the importance of body mechanics. She told me Michael Curran who works with her has trained other workers on the farm how to properly use their bodies and they've seen far less injuries. Just what I need to learn!

Gardening is becoming very popular and even necessary to some as a way to supplement their diets. Just as we need to use the proper tools to break the ground, so do we need to know how to use our bodies so we don't break them! Below is the information, join me!

Proper use of your best gardening tool - Your Body!

June 19, 2010 We all know that gardening is a great way to get some exercise, but sometimes it can be a pain - literally! - in the back, the hands, the shoulders, hips, knees, or even the feet. All of your tools are designed to be used in a certain way, and your body is no different! Do you still have your user's manual? Did you even get one?! This fun and entertaining class IS your user's manual for mechanically-correct gardening. Learn what "using your legs instead of your back" actually means. Learn to listen to what you body is telling you - which pains are GOOD and which ones are BAD. Michael Curran is a certified Restorative Exercise Specialist and Ayurvedic Medicine Practitioner. He developed this class after two years on the farm, where he has trained dozens of farm workers how to work all day and stay healthy and strong. 10 A.M. 1 hour. $20.00 per person. Reservations needed. Refreshments included. Call 805-648-6808

Food Films at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2010!

Mr. Okra/ film still from LA Film Festival Website

Nothing better than vittles on the big screen and this weekend in LA 6/17-6/27, there are a handful of great films being served up at the Los Angeles Film Festival!

Also, for those food-inclined, La Restaurants are having all sorts of specials and discounts that coincide with the festival so hold onto your ticket, pass or stub so you can partake!

Udon, , playing 6/19 @4 pm is listed as "a high-spirited comic ode to the power of Japan's Ubiquitous noodle." It will be presented by Jonathan Gold, restaurant critic for the LA Weekly, contributor to Good Food and This American Life and author of Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles.

Friday 6/18 @ 9:45 & Sunday 6/20 @ 10 pm, Bitter Feast will be screened. Written and directed by Joe Maggio, Bitter Feast is a dark tale of a food blogger who upsets a chef's destiny with one bad review. It's a bloody tale of revenge.

Dumdumdum: Audio Food, plays as 5 min. part of Big In Japan: A Selection of Japanese Music Videos which is 87 min in its entirety.

And Mr. Okra is part of a shorts program that airs 6/19 @ 1:45 and 6/25 @ 10:15 pm. It follows the story of an "iconic" New Orleans food vendor who "peddles his wares from a brightly painted truck".

A Family, is the story of an elite family of master bakers, (chosen to bake for the royal family), whose gets offered the job of a lifetime as a museum curator in New York and how that tests the family. It plays 6/19 @7 pm. 6/20 @ 1:30 pm & 7/23 @ 4:45 pm.

Kings of Pastry plays 6/26 @ 7:15. Watch 16 of France's top pastry chefs in a "mouth-watering" competition for the coveted collar of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France.

Sugar Bear's Cupcake Shack -- Ventura CA

photos by DK Crawford, key used to give an idea of size

I am $6 lighter and two cupcakes heavier. Today I popped into the new cupcake shack in Ventura for a sweet treat. It's in the El Jardin courtyard at 451 E. Main St., part of the old location of Zoey's downtown. It's owned by the same folks who brought We Olive to Ventura.

The place is small and sweet, bedecked in pink. A delightful teen helped me and was really fluent in information about Sugar Bear's.

They had 6 cupcake flavors today: Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Red Velvet, Lemon and a Cinnamon Butter Cream Cupcake, their signature cupcake named the Sugar Bear. Cupcakes are $3 a piece and they also have small mixed dozens of mini cupcakes available for $21.

All the cupcakes look pretty simple and begged the question of what makes them gourmet? I was told they use local ingredients, specifically olive oils from We Olive, local oranges and lemons, more natural ingredients and they aren't overly sweet. They plan on creating seasonal flavors as well as special vegan cupcakes. I bought a chocolate cupcake with olive oil and the signature Sugar Bear to try.

The cupcakes are medium sized and travelled well in their plastic cupcake container. As Chris watched me take them out of the container, he said he thought the prices were high for their size. "I expect them to taste like heaven on earth," he mumbled as I was slicing the knife through, making bite-sized wedges.

First smell of the Sugar Bear signature cupcake was pure butta. The cake itself was light and airy and delicate and yes, not overly sweet while the icing was buttery with a hint of sour cream. The icing itself was quite sweet -- sweet enough to make me cough when I got a good bite of it. But it was really tasty and had flavors I could lose myself in for a while -- like a decadent summer day.

"It's pretty damn good," surmised Chris. "If I were at a wedding and they had these, I'd have more than one." I looked at him suspiciously "Chris, you'd have more than one no matter what!" He agreed and said, "Ok, you're right, maybe I'd have more than two!" We laughed and moved on to the chocolate.

It smelled like a rich, fudgy brownie. When I pushed the knife through it, it was effortless until I hit something hard in the center. I pulled out the knife a bit and a dark chocolate chip fell out. The chocolate cupcake was very very rich and intense. Made with olive oil, the intensity of the flavor carries through each bite. The cake itself was denser than the Sugar Bear and the chocolate crumbles a bit messy as they tended to fall out of the bottom into the paper cup underneath rather than stay part of the bites. Both cupcakes were difficult to try to take pieces of which only shows how tender they were.

The chocolate is perfect for those moments when you're going to bite someone's head off if you don't get chocolate n-o-w! We enjoyed it but ultimately finished the Sugar Bear together and left half of the chocolate because it was too much, too rich.

Having opened just last week, Sugar Bear's is still finding its feet as a new business. The cupcakes were humble in appearance and the flavors, all fairly predictable so far, were limited. The Sugar Bear Cinnamon Cupcake was the most unique and it was delicious. As they've just opened, I know they are keeping it simple for now. They do have some great starts with the local idea and keeping the cakes themselves not too too sweet. I haven't come to a conclusion about them yet, I'll keep watching.

Meanwhile, here are thoughts on two other cupcake makers in Ventura I've tried.

Michelle Michelle's Couture Cupcakery Cupcakes are full of flavor and punch and are artistically presented, like small, jeweled packages. Her flavors are terribly exciting and varied -- tart, sweet, spicy, you name it, it comes through the compact cupcakes. The Jeter Jeter Pumpkin Eater, Cup of Lemonade and After Dinner Mint are a few of my favorites. I could order different cupcakes from her for every occasion or season and never tire. I wrote about her for Ventana and spent a few months trying to sample all her flavors. They are hard to beat.

Also SHoCAKES, formerly sold at Cooke's Smokehouse, (currently figuring out where her next cupcake home will be), are large, sloopy, messy orgasmic madness in the form of a cupcake. I remember trying to cut them into pieces to share at a party and instead I made an icing, cupcakey stew on the plate but that stopped no one. Her Smores and Peanut Butter n Jelly Cupcakes were as close to bathing in cupcakes as I've ever come. They're large, indulgent and a blast!