healthy cooking 101

You may have read food critic Michael Pollan's famous food slogans to  "eat food, not too much, mostly plants," and to eat only "what your great-grandmother would have recognized as food."  This excludes of course all the processed bad-for-you convenience foods, and basically recommends making your own out of a few good base ingredients.   Some people really don't like to cook, the way I don't really like to garden.   They don't connect with the creative act of manipulating raw ingredients and making magic out of it, although they may be creative elsewhere in life.

So for all of you who don't like to cook, here are some really simple tricks to make something delicious out of nothing much in mere minutes.    Some of the simplest and most wholesome homemade foods are of the dippy kind - the stuff you can scoop up with chips, raw or semi-cooked vegetables (crudités in French), a piece of toasted bread or pita or toasted tortilla.  They don't even require cooking.

• Hummus and bean dips - put cooked chickpeas or beans into your food processor  with some tahini (sesame seed paste), lemon juice, garlic and salt, a bit of olive oil if you like, and some water for thinning.  Voilà - hummus, the Middle Eastern specialty.  You could omit the tahini and add rosemary or oven roasted garlic to cooked beans or lentils, you could add sun dried tomatoes or roasted peppers to the hummus, or anything else that strikes your creative fancy (perhaps herbs, cumin, or chili to add heat).

• Guacamole is mushed up ripe avocado with some lemon juice, salt and a bit of chopped tomato, nothing more. 

• Pesto is simply a whole lot of basil leaves processed in the food processor over a base of a bit of cheese (parmesan or pecorino), a few nuts (the traditional pine nuts are expensive; walnuts work fine, I often use sunflower seeds), a bit of garlic and salt, and then enough olive oil to bind it all together.  That's it.  Delicious on pasta, a sandwich, pizza, a slice of toasted bread, a raw sliced tomato, keep on dreaming.....

• Liptauer is an easy spread I remember from my German childhood.  It is simply Greek yogurt (now that it's so easily available) or fresh farmer cheese with some paprika (smoked is yummy), caraway seeds and salt folded in.  So easy.  Great as a spread on some crisp bread (quick and healthy snack), a dip for raw vegetables or chips, or just as is by the spoonful (for breakfast or snack).

warming winter foods

This time of year we naturally tend towards hearty soups and stews.  The French have their cassoulet, the Chinese eat their snake soup in the winter.  As Paul Pitchford says in his seminal Healing with Whole Foods, "cold and darkness drive one to seek inner warmth."

But besides the thermal warmth of a hot stew, according to Chinese medicine certain foods have actual warming properties and accelerate your sluggish energy when the temperatures are cold (such as snake soup, but no recipe for that here, although we ate it when we lived in Hong Kong many years ago).  Paul Pitchford talks about the benefits of salty and bitter foods in the winter, and my acupuncturist reminded me that this is the time of year for bone broths and warming spices like ginger, cinnamon, and cloves.

Save the bones or bony back when you make chicken or get some beef bones, and simply put them in a big pot of water with some carrots, celery and onions and simmer for a long time, even over night.  Right now I have a whole bunch of chicken necks cooking on the stove to make a soup base (found two bags in the freezer from my last chicken order from the farm).  Or better yet, for a richer broth roast the carcass or bones in the oven with some vegetables before cooking.

These broths are delicious as is, or make a great base for all kinds of heart warming and hearty soups. And why not invite a few friends over to share your soup and shake off the winter doldrums?

too much of a good thing

What goes up must come down.  We have been eating a lot of rich foods in the past few days, and are likely to resume eating rich foods next week for the New Year's celebrations.

Fact is most of our special holiday dishes are protein based, whether from meat, fish, or crustaceans.   Fact is, though, that as omnivores we thrive on a well balanced diet, and that festive meals tend to be especially rich in protein, fat and sugar, while lacking what we consider the mundane basics - produce, fiber, grains. Culturally and historically, protein in whatever form was expensive because costly to provide - ergo reserved for special occasions.  Same went for sugar and fat. Remember the Sunday roast? It was special.  Meat was not eaten every day; nor were cakes and pastries.   We used to save them and savor them.

photo courtesy www.jeanclaudesbakery.com

Things are a bit out of whack now because food has become cheap and that former frame of reference is gone.  Most of us can afford all the "special" stuff, which is no longer so special.  Therefore we need to reign in those cravings through self-control and activate our critical-analytical thinking skills.  At the prospect of a meatless dinner my son usually says "awwww" in disappointment.   But too much of the rich stuff and we feel heavy, sluggish, full.

So back to well balanced meals after the holidays for a well balanced body.

food as fuel???

nutrition label

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According to the scientific and mechanistic worldview this culture has subscribed to for the past three hundred or so years food is not much more than fuel in form of calories that can be described on a nutritional label in terms of its scientific components.  How sad and simplistic!  How unromantic and incomplete! According to the holistic model food is nourishment for body and spirit in so many ways.   According to this model quality is more important than quantification.  It matters what you eat, it matters in what circumstances and company you eat, it matters how your food was grown or raised, it matters whether your food is fresh or processed, it matters whether you enjoy your food or not, it matters how you relate to it.  It becomes a complex and multi- faceted approach.

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Guess which model is more fun, more enjoyable, more meaningful and ultimately more healthy?

Please also read a previous related post.

what the heck is kernza?

You might ask what the heck Kernza is?  It's about sustainable agriculture.   Sustainable means in short eternally renewable from within, which is without bringing in outside products.

We almost take for granted the annual winter seed buying ritual from seed catalogs.  But I always thought that buying those decorative annuals for the garden was a bit of a waste, compared to perennials that come up every year again, no worries, no money, no effort.  Wouldn't it be nice if our wheat came up every year again?  No buying seeds, no sowing, no tilling, less effort, less money.  Researchers have been working on exactly that: developing perennial varieties of our staple cereals, and Kernza is one of them.

This is thinking more in terms of permaculture (please read my previous post on it), a perennial polyculture, which is what most ecosystems look like as Mark Bittman explains in a recent article:  "In perennial polyculture, the plants may fertilize one another, physically support one another, ward off pests and diseases together, resist drought and flood, and survive even when one member suffers."  How does that sound for a wonderfully cooperative plant community?  No Darwin here.

You can start small in your own garden by saving seeds from this year's harvest for next year's planting instead of relying on the big seed companies; or look for a local seed library for some interesting heirloom varieties.  Local seed libraries  (see Hudson Valley Seed Library) work collaboratively and require you to bring back some of your own seeds to keep the library replenished.

Think in renewable cycles.

boring homogenous food

I love food, I love to travel, and I love to try food from other places in the world.  Bill Clinton said "we need to look at how people do things in other places."  Of course he did not say that with regard to food.  He said it at the sustainability conference about expanding our insular and one-sided perspective on politics, energy policy and sustainability here in the US.  But the idea is the same. Fast food joints turn out the same food whether you are in Paris, Los Angeles or New York.  Whether food or Western culture at large, homogenization simply goes against nature's grain, because nature is all about diversity and increasing complexity with ongoing development.  And what we eat depends on what grows where we live.  Different soil, different climate, different culture, different ecosystems create different foods, which in turn allow us to create completely different dishes.

What fear of life let's us be comforted by the knowledge that we can eat the same hamburger and French fries even if we travel halfways around the globe?  I will scream if one more pizza joint, one more Italian restaurant or Chinese take-out opens in our town.  Instead, give me Indian, Thai, a fish restaurant, real Chinese, or true local American.

It's about discovery, it's about opening up to new tastes, new experiences, new ingredients, a zest for life and all it has to offer.   I tried duck tongues (tough and

chewy) and chicken feet (didn't like those) in China, green papaya salad in the Phillipines (delicious), chirimoyas in Peru (creamily yummy), jackfruit in Hong Kong (so so; ripe ones are so smelly they are forbidden on the Singapore subway), and of course frogs' legs and escargots in France (love them).

Let's celebrate the diversity of life, let's discover what people have to say in other places, how they eat in other places, how they do things differently from us.  Why must we be politically correct?  Why can't we live with our differences and appreciate them?  Discuss them?  Learn from them?  We need to accept that the entire world cannot be homogenous.  Imagine if the whole country were Republican?  Or Democrat?  If everyone wore the same outfits?  Boring.

we can buy calories but not real nourishment

That's what Charles Eisenstein wrote. Since my last blog post was about the importance of feeding the soul, in that case through mantras, I'll continue a bit along those lines. Gaining nourishment from food is a many-layered process that includes a lot more than counting the calories of a meal or dissecting its nutritional content. Those are quantifying analyses. But the soul also gets nourishment from the qualitative aspects in and around food.

What might those elements be? The first thing that comes to mind has to do with how the food grew, was or was not processed, and how it was made. Vegetables and fruits grown in healthy and mineral rich soil on a small farm with loving care, grown without -ides (pesti-, insecti-, fungi-), harvested at the height of their ripe- or readyness, and used for cooking as soon as possible after harvesting, is incredibly nourishing to body and soul. Its intrinsic quality is so much more complex than produce that was harvested before ripening (bananas, peaches, tomatoes grown on large farms all get harvested before their prime to ensure unsquooshed arrival at the supermarket), had to be shuttled cross country or across continents, and then sits in the supermarket for another few days, before making it to our fridge, where it sits yet another few days. Same goes for meat, for those who do eat meat.  It matters in what surroundings the animal was kept, how it was handled, what it was fed, and how it met its end.  That quality, which we introduce into our body, has an influence on our spirit.

Other elements that add a more ethereal quality to the food we eat are the care and love and interest with which we prepare and cook the food. A lovingly prepared and composed dish will have a better energetic quality than a quickly slapped together microwaved meal. Your homemade jar of jam has so much more qualitative depth than one from the supermarket that's been made industrially.

Lastly, the context within which we eat the meal can nourish the soul. A nicely set table helps; taking the time to sit down as a family for a meal sets a comforting and warm tone of togetherness for the day or evening; and sharing a leisurely meal with friends imbues the food with a different meaning than eating alone.  And just think of those special holiday meals coming up soon.

Also look back at my post "food, glorious food."

there's no food!

At least that's what my son keeps telling me.  "Mom, there is no food in the fridge/pantry!"  He doesn't mean that there is literally nothing in the fridge or pantry.  He means that there are no little packages and baggies with portion size snacks he can just help himself to. The thing is, I cook from scratch.  So fridge and pantry are stocked with "basics" to create meals, such as legumes, grains, canned tomatoes, flour and so on.  That's indeed pretty unsatisfying for someone looking for a quick snack.  "You are so European, mom," he says, the idea being that Europeans don't snack as much as we do over here.

So then - what about healthy unpackaged snacks?  My daughter has recently taken to making "quick nachos" by simply grating cheese over some tortilla chips and broiling them in the oven for a few minutes.  Other wholesome "from-scratch" afternoon snack ideas for hungry school children are apple slices with pea/nut butter and/or chocolate/hazelnut paste, oven broiled cinnamon toasts, oven broiled cheese toasts, yogurt/ricotta cheese with honey and sunflower seeds, a few chunks of cheddar and some fruit, crackers with hummus, nuts with raisins or dried cranberries.  There you go - we do have food.

shark fin soup and hope

If the Chinese are back peddling on shark fin soup, so ubiquitous at all festive banquets of the past, there is hope for changes in our attitude about a lot of other things as well.  I am thinking of idling stances on such pressing issues as climate change, pollution, animal welfare, GMOs, child prostitution, and many other ugly realities.  It seems to me that ultimately our collective indecisiveness on these issues boils down to the hesitance of wrestling ourselves away from the profit-first model.  If we only realized that the wellbeing-first model benefits us all around. Bonnie Tsui wrote this week-end in the NY Times about the changing attitude of the Chinese on serving shark fin soup at important banquets, previously a sign of "honoring (and impressing) your guest."  I was served shark fin soup at several banquets in my company's honor in the late 1980s when we lived in Hong Kong, and was oblivious of the gruesome practice (which I can't bear to describe here, but you can look it up).    Because it has been such an inherent component of Chinese food culture I was really quite amazed to read that "last summer, the Chinese government announced that it would stop serving the dish at official state banquets."

Here's to change for the better, change towards wellbeing, change towards respect of nature and all living beings. 

the fat myth

Food research of the past years has revealed that food is healthiest when we eat it the way nature made it.  When food becomes a "product," meaning when it comes from a factory and they've done stuff to it, it's no longer so healthy and in many instances even harmful. There are a lot of food myths out there that we/our culture created from the ill gotten belief that man-made stuff would surpass what nature makes because it is based on science.  But the food industry pushes under the rug that it's really after the profit, not your health, and that's what they apply their science to.

So here goes the fat myth:

FAT IS BAD FOR YOU  - "lite products" are better for you.

Hence low fat and no fat everything, cheese, milk, yogurt.  The absurd and unhealthy culminations of this misguided belief system of course are butter substitute and margarine, not much nature left in those.  Hence also the French Paradox - why the northern French don't get fat on all their cream and butter and delicious camembert, and the southern French thrive on the olive oil rich Mediterranean diet.  Sally Fallon, one of my nouveau food idols, has all the scientific back-up information for the skeptics in her oft cited food myth debunker and cookbook Nourishing Traditions.

I switched our whole family back to full fat everything a few years ago (I am only a few steps ahead) and we have neither gained weight nor become sick; as a matter-of-fact, we are all very healthy, love to eat, and never spare a thought on the fat question.