I love me some coconut oil.

Six months ago I bought a gallon of canola oil. Currently it's sitting in my hall closet and hasn't even been opened, because shortly thereafter, I bought a tub of coconut oil!  I've decided that it is a much better choice than canola.

I think canola oil (besides being a newly invented, industrial oil) is smelly and tastes awful. Have you ever tried a spoonful of the stuff? It also smokes up my cast iron pans like crazy, so it's useless when I cook in cast iron (which I've been trying to do more). I can smell a canola-fried food a mile away, and it's a bitter, awful odor. I just really don't like it anymore!

So, instead of canola, I've been using a lot more healthy fats like coconut oil, which is the topic of this post. I love me some real butter too, and use it often. This is not a post about replacing butter! Butter is also full of healthy yummy goodness, and I think it's a great real food to use. I just wanted to share some of the ways I use coconut oil, and why I love it so very much!

By way of introduction, coconut oil is solid below 76 degrees or so, and it is liquid around 80 degrees. It is a very stable oil that doesn't go rancid easily. There are apparently lots of really science-ey reasons why it's healthy -- but I don't like having to be a biologist to understand my food.  If LDL/HDL cholesterol, lauric acid, medium chain fatty acids, and such things excite you, you should probably look it up. Coconut oil is full of healthy saturated fats, and it helps our bodies absorb the nutrients it's eaten with.

"The Adventure of a Lifetime"

Today I'd like to share something that I wrote about a year and a half ago, for one of my final English classes before I graduated. The class was actually something I'd put off for two years; it ended up being the most worthless class I ever took, except for this paper.

The assignment was something like "write about an event in your childhood." Everything in the class seemed to be geared towards sixth graders. The class roster was full of nonmajors who had to take one English class, and had heard this class was easy.

This essay is kind of long, but I hope you read it to the end. Every time I read it, even though I wrote it, for pete's sake, I get teary. This ended up being one of my favorite things I've ever written. It's about a piece of my life, of my family's life really, that most people don't know about, and that we rarely talk about anymore.

"The Adventure of a Lifetime"

Everywhere was wood, beams of wood on the ceiling, slats of wood on the walls, planks of wood on the floors.  Needles of light pierced through in places, illuminating, for a fraction of a second, a million microscopic specks of dust, each one glowing briefly and then returning to its dusky journey through the air.

Everywhere was sound, still singing in my mind to this day, that joyfully creaking floor, the sound of bright and clear quiet, punctuated by whinnies and the shuffling of feet and hooves.  Oh, the sound of peace in the world.  Not utter silence, but the calm chorus of creatures in harmony, man and beast in interdependence.

Everywhere was the fragrance of molasses, of dust on its travels, of shiny, worn leather and ancient trusty woolen blankets, of the creaking wooden floor powdered with bits of hay, alfalfa and manure.  Earth, dung and food mingled in the air to bless us with a sweetly organic and remarkable scent, which has been found no other place in the universe, save for every stable which has ever existed.

An eleven-year-old mind cannot process everything it takes in, but instead, subconsciously stores it all up for later.  As I took in these sights, smells and sounds, my younger sister Johanna stood next to me, both of us on the threshold of a world of new experiences. We stood in the entrance of a stable.  A real horse stable.  On a real horse ranch, and a real horse rider next to us.  Her name was Skye – which was appropriate, since it seemed like Johanna and I had been granted an early pass to heaven itself.  And, as we stepped into the stable, in awe of all its wonders, we knew the pinnacle of our new adventure was yet to come: Skye was going to teach us to ride horses.

It was very cold, that day when we first walked into the stable.  We’d worn our favorite cowboy boots and the black cowgirl hats we’d gotten as gifts; under my embarrassingly not-cowgirl (puffy pink) coat I wore my favorite sweatshirt, a white one adorned with appliquéd cowboy boots.  The luckier of us might have even donned a pair of plastic spurs – we only had one set between us, and we had to share.  

Christmas day had come and gone, but the decorations were still on the walls at home, and the frigid Colorado winds weren’t nearly finished bringing snow to our town.   The holidays were always joyful at our home, but this year had brought a special treat to us Trexel girls, when we were given a year’s worth of horseback riding lessons.  Nothing could have been more appropriate, more desired or more benevolently granted.  Johanna and I lived under a wide Colorado sky, and we had been reared on a good dose of Chris LeDoux and other Cowboy music (totally different from Country music).  Our favorite songs had titles like “Call of the Wild” and “You Can’t See Him From the Road.”  We were more in love with horses, and the freedom and adventure they epitomized, than with anything else in the world.  We collected models of them, subscribed to magazines about them, cut out pictures of them whenever possible, and dreamed of the day we would have one of our own.  Our model horses had creative names: Running Water, Romantic Rosebud, Little Mermaid, Grey Ghost.

The library was of particular interest to us, as it served up an infinite supply of (free!) horse-related literature.  We buried ourselves in the novels of Marguerite Henry, memorized horse breeds and the names of forehead markings, and convinced ourselves that Western, cowboy-style riding was far superior to English style.  Our dad fed our obsession by securing a steady flow of Paint Horse magazines from a coworker who raised that particular breed – she gave us every precious, glossy tome when she finished reading it.  After devouring every word of the articles, we would cut out the best pictures (sometimes the original owner even left the centerfolds for us!) and tape them onto our walls. We watched rodeos with enthusiasm and derby races with detachment – derbies were about horses, but after all, those were English riders who rode in fences and in circles.  In our young minds, Western riding was about wildness and untamed freedom (although the cruelty of keeping panicked horses in rodeo cages never occurred to us). We had been catechized in the theology of Chris Ledoux; English-style riding, fences, country music, perfectly manicured lawns, and everything perfect and restrictive were sheer blasphemy.