Peeking into the rock

If you want to know if a food is high in a particular nutrient, don't rely on someone else's received lists or the opinions of your friends. Do a little simple arithmetic instead. Find charts that provide: 1. the calories per serving: and 2. the amount of that nutrient in the serving. Then find charts that provide: A. a reasonable daily calorie intake for you at your sex, weight and age (or else use a good estimation of your actual calorie intake) and B. the amount of that nutrient someone in your condition ought to be having (taking everything into account: like, if you know you're not absorbing the nutrient well, or if you know that you have a higher need for it because of your situation -- one of which is probably true if you're interested enough in this to do this much research).

Now divide A by 1 and divide B by 2. Compare the numbers. A/1 means how many servings of that food it would take to give you your whole day's calories. B/2 means how many servings of that food it would take you to get your whole day's needs for that nutrient. If A/1 is not larger than B/2, the food is not "high" in that nutrient. It may be a nice food, but it is not providing a larger share of the nutrient than you ought to be able to get from an "average" food. If you need to get more of that nutrient from your food, you need to look elsewhere.

This was prompted by my roommate telling me to eat almonds for iron. I was pretty sure this was not correct. I do love almonds. Almonds are lovely for flavor and food and minerals in general but they are not especially high in iron. But it turns out sunfl"ower seeds are high in iron. This is a wonderful insight, as sunflower seeds are very inexpensive if you get them at Trader Joe's -- they're right there with peanuts in the economy nuts and seeds category -- and I adore them. I eat bowlfuls of them sometimes! And they go very well into salads and stirfries and on top of kookoo-fritattas. I buy them roasted and unsalted, myself, but they come raw and also roasted and salted.

Currently, though, my teeth are irritated from long-deferred dental work and I am not eating anything hard except lettuce, and that I am chewing awkwardly with my front teeth. I keep telling myself, this is temporary, no need to get pissy about it.

Also, I can't find a good translation for a line in a Czech children's song. I'm pretty sure what the whole line means, but there's one word I can't get in the dictionary and the online translator completely fails on it, giving me gibberish. It doesn't do well with Czech verbs, which have stacking auxiliaries (you know, like in English "I had been going to drive there forever, but I never did get around to doing it" -- onlhy, of course, different). It insists on translating each element as a stand-alone word, most of the time, except sometimes unpredictably it will gang up two of them -- and, you guessed it, it gangs up the wrong ones frequently.

Just in case anybody around here knows somebody who speaks Czech (oh wait, I do! I'll ask Hana), here's the verse, with the problem word in italics:

"Když jsem já ty koně pásal
přišla na mě dřimota,
koně vešli do žita.

I think it means, "When I was taking the horse to pasture
I fell asleep
and the horse went into the rye."

But I can't get any kind of meaning for pásal. I believe it is the past participle of a verb like "to pasture" but I can't find any direct evidence for it. If I am right, the verb is jsem pásal "I was pasturing." But what is the infinitive form, that I can't find it anywhere?