Yummy Thai Style soup is a delightful soup that can be warmed, eaten at room temperature, or chilled for a cooling treat on hot days. It's spicy, richly flavored, and nutritious-and its secret ingredient comes from fresh lemongrass. Serve as is, or with salads, breads, or a sprouted grain or seed dish, such as quinoa with mangos and hot peppers, or soaked sunflower seeds with ginger and miso.

Ingredients (Serves 2-4):
2 cups pure water
1 and 1/4 cups zucchini angel hair "pasta"
3 carrots (1 and 1/2 cup, chopped)
1/3 yam (1 cup, chopped)
4 tablespoons coconut milk
3 tablespoons green onion
2 tablespoons South River Azuki Bean Miso
1 tablespoon raw tahini
1 stalk lemongrass*
1-2 inches ginger root
1 small clove garlic, optional
1-2 small shakes cayenne
*If you can't find fresh lemongrass, make a tea with dried lemon grass, and use it in place of the water.

Directions
Put carrots, yams, coconut milk, green onions, lemongrass, ginger root, tahini, miso, cayenne, and optional garlic into Vitamix and process on highest speed for one minute. Strain. Put into large bowl.
(Or, juice veggies and garlic in a standard juicer. Transfer to a large bowl. Add water, tahini, coconut milk, and spices and mix well.)
Make zucchini angel hair pasta with a Saladacco. If you don't have one, use a veggie grater.
Add zucchini to the bowl and serve at room temperature, or place ingredients in a pan and gently warm to 110 degrees.

Garnish
For each individual bowl, add 2 tablespoons cashews, 2-3 teaspoons minced green onions, and a few cilantro leaves.

One of the books we are reading this summer is The Blending Book. It's an easy book to get into and covers areas such as cleansing, sprouting, how to grow wheat grass at home, how to make rejuvelac, and it also includes many recipes (some blended, some not) for drinks, soups, salads, dressings, and deserts.

The author, Ann Wigmore, pioneered wheat grass juice therapy and living foods, and started the Hippocrates Diett, named in honor after the Greek healer, Hippocrates (circa 460 BC), who was reported to have said, "let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food". Her discoveries were preceded by dramatic events that took place in her life.

In the book she briefly recounts how she broke both of her legs in a car accident when she was sixteen. Gangrene had set in and the doctors advised amputation. She refused, and remembered how her grandmother had taught her about using what was in nature for healing. She began to eat everything green that she could find. She even went outside and chewed grass and ate flowers, and laid in the sun. To everyone's amazement she made a full recovery.

Many years later at age fifty, after having lived a normal life, eating as most people do, she got migraines, arthritis, and colon cancer. This inspired her to create a diet based completely on living foods. These she blended and ate with lightly fermented foods, because her digestion couldn't handle the roughage of normal foods at that time. In the process, once again, she completely cured herself and found that she had devised a system for health that could help other people too. It was at this time that she began to teach her methods, and co-founded the Hippocrates Health Institute in Boston with Victoras Kulvinskas.

I find it extraordinary that she was led intuitively to initiate these health practices—seemingly against all odds. She lived to be 82 (her life was cut short from smoke inhalation during a fire at the Hippocrates Health Institute) and had astounding vigor and strength, sleeping for just a few hours each night. She has been a beacon to millions of people, including Rex and me. We will be forever grateful for her discoveries, her courage, fortitude, and wisdom.