Pomegranates Grow Well in the High Desert

How to Make
Raw Pomegranate Juice

We have more pomegranates this year than ever on our pomegranate tree.

I love pomegranates and have been eyeballing this basket filled with pomegranates I picked off of our tree last year.   They have tasty dried seeds in them, however are quite difficult to dig out so they may end up being recycled in our compost pile.

It is now time to harvest our this year's crop of pomegranates.

I just happened to get an email this morning from Ronnie and Minh, who are amazing Raw Foodists.  Ronnie just created a YouTube video on how easy it is to make your own pomegranate juice.

He selects a pomegranate that is already cracked and picks it before the birds get to it.

First he cuts it in half and places it face down in a pan of water.  Then he breaks apart the halves under the water in the pan and the seeds fall out easily into the pan. He throws out the white casing that was around the seeds and the outside shell.

Then, he sets a small strainer on top of a glass and uses a wood cooking utensil to squish the juice easily into the glass leaving the seeds in the strainer.

I am so happy to find out how easy it is to get the seeds out of pomegranates now and make my own yummy pomegranate juice.

Watch Ronnie's video on how to make Raw Pomegranate Juice

Heaven Is Real - Amazing Story

Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon who claims to have visited the afterlife

By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow – Tue, Oct 9, 2012

Dr. Eben Alexander claims to have visited the afterlife (Twitter)Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.

But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.

"According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent," Alexander writes in the cover story of this week's edition of Newsweek.

So what exactly does heaven look like?

Alexander says he first found himself floating above clouds before witnessing, "transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer like lines behind them."

He claims to have been escorted by an unknown female companion and says he communicated with these beings through a method of correspondence that transcended language. Alexander says the messages he received from those beings loosely translated as:

"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."

"You have nothing to fear."

"There is nothing you can do wrong."

From there, Alexander claims to have traveled to "an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting." He believes this void was the home of God.

After recovering from his meningitis-induced coma, Alexander says he was reluctant to share his experience with his colleagues but found comfort inside the walls of his church. He's chronicled his experience in a new book, Proof of Heaven: A neurosurgeon's journey into the afterlife," which will be published in late October.

"I'm still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I had my experience," Alexander writes. "But on a deep level I'm very different from the person I was before, because I've caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right."

There is an amazing video on Yahoo today about this but I couldn't figure out how to load it into my blog.