my new favorite spice

            Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, and often I find the taste of cinnamon a bit too predictable and a bit too Christmassy.  Cardamom has become my new favorite spice (smoked paprika is a close second), and it works well in many instances where the recipe calls for cinnamon.  Cardamom has such an elegant fragrance and taste - light and flowery, and entirely unique.  There is really nothing quite like cardamom.

            I have found whole pods in Indian rice dishes, it's used in Middle Eastern desserts, the Swedes sprinkle it in the dough of their yeast rolls.  It's beautiful in tea, black or green, makes for an instant chai, just add some latte (cow's or almond) - no sugar needed.  It works well in mild desserts where its unique flavor really stands on its own, such as rice pudding, panna cotta, chia pudding, or cardamom flavored vanilla ice cream.  And sprinkling it on your breakfast oatmeal makes the mundane sophisticated.

            As an ancient Indian spice, that's been around the block a few times, it has of course medicinal properties, and chewing on a pod freshens your breath.  Just open a spice jar with cardamom pods or powder and let yourself be transported far far away by the fragrance of this beautiful spice.

no size fits all

            You are unique, your digestive system is unique, your food preferences are unique, your constitution, in combination with ethnic provenance and health history, is unique. 

            It's ok to critically read books on diet trends (paleo, ketogenic, vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, ethnic), or on nutrition, in order to become informed on the state of our food and its profound influence on our wellbeing.  But then you need to test these theories mindfully on your own body to understand what agrees with you and what doesn't, what aggravates certain conditions or alleviates them, what gives you energy, what regulates your weight, what helps you heal.  The one exception I'll take is refined sugar.  It's not good for anybody.  Period.

            We like to simplify and standardize, but imagine what would happen if some diet fundamentalist prescribed the same diet for all seven billion people on this planet?  Digestive systems have adapted over hundreds and thousands of years to what is available geographically.  Prescribe a vegetarian diet to an Inuit, or an Inuit diet to a Hindu - ok, these are extreme analogies - and they would likely become ill.

            So, take all you read, all that people say, with a grain of salt - then see what really applies to your own condition and constitution.   Although I had already cut out a lot of grain from my diet (and lost quite a bit of weight in the process) I am currently trying this gluten-free thing.  I'm really not convinced this is necessary for me - we'll see, hoping to prove myself wrong.  No diet applies to all - which one is the right one for you?

my black dirt dinner

            "Take off your shoes," she nudged me, and I did.  "Have you ever walked on black dirt?" she wanted to know.  How lucky am I to get to feel the soft and slightly moist, gorgeously rich black dirt, under my bare feet on this fabulously beautiful morning, and pick my dinner? 

            Ahead of regular market hours, the farm sent an email inviting their regulars to come and pick the first greens of the season directly in the field.  They said "any time after nine." I jumped at the opportunity.  Sure, I get my share of greens from my coop and various other places during the cold months (produce that comes from the other side of the country).  But local greens, freshly picked on the farm (by me on top of it) - soooo much better.   Rhubarb, baby turnips (the greens are the healthiest part!), broccoli rabe, spinach, and Persian cucumbers from the greenhouse, are my loot from this morning.

       All of you who are avid gardeners might mildly smile at my excitement as you walk out your door and into your vegetable garden to pick your dinner.  As a transplanted city girl with an herb patch and a few eggplant and kale plants for good measure, I am excited.  The remembrance of this morning's black dirt expedition will live in tonight's dinner.  Deep food - it's all about the experience.

winging dinner

           Most of the time I wing dinner.  In food cultures, like China or France, many people still go shopping either every day or every few days.  I don't.  It's not practical for me, nor is it for most people I know.  I buy my produce in bulk every other week.  Meat or fish I have in the freezer and pull out ahead of time, sometimes with a recipe in mind, most of the time not. 

            Whether I get produce from the coop (once a month) or from elsewhere, I look for what looks good and is reasonably priced.  That means that I usually don't shop with a produce shopping list and specific recipes in mind.  It also means that I often need to invent dinner on the spot.

            Usually I stick my head into the refrigerator sometime late in the afternoon, see what needs to be used as a matter of priority (greens and eggplant go first, cauliflower and peppers keep longer), what makes sense to prepare together, and whether to pair it with some meat or fish (which I will have had to thaw ahead of time - yes, I can plan that much ahead), perhaps eggs, cheese or legumes for protein, or even some leftovers.  Sometimes I'll access my own recipe repertoire in the back of my mind, sometimes I'll look through a cook book, often I punch a few ingredients in my phone and see what recipe comes up. A few days ago I found a terrific quinoa and fennel salad that way. 

          Many times my dinner process is an adventure.  When my daughter asks in the afternoon "Mom, what's for dinner?" my answer is often "We'll see," because I really won't know until I make it.

on losing weight

            Different lifestyles call for different diets.  Let's face it, the majority of us have sedentary jobs.  Most of us don't farm all day long, don't lift heavy equipment all day long, and are not high performance sports people.  Most of the time most of us sit behind the computer much of the day, and sometimes behind the wheel or on public transportation.  Yet, our diet, in general, is still carb heavy. 

            Indeed, you need lots of carbs to sustain you if you have a very physical job - the way our ancestors did when they created the agricultural diet of grains and starches we still hang on to.  But if you sit most of the day you don't need all that bready, noodly, ricy, potatoy type of food (sugar is a whole other bad matter - empty calories and inflammatory) - hence, it's easy to gain weight on this diet.

             Soooooo - if you want to lose weight, and if you don't work in construction or farming, consider cutting out some of those refined carbs and starches and making friends with all those low cal/low carb vegetables such as peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, greens, asparagus, squash, mushrooms, cucumbers, eggplant, and tomatoes (I probably forgot some).  Of course you'll need to make them delicious - I don't care for steamed broccoli one bit!   Spice them up (the Indians have developed delicious spice combinations), combine them, sprinkle parmesan over them, broil them with olive oil until they are a bit toasty burnt on top, add lots of garlic, or butter, or sesame oil, sauce them up, puree them - mmmhhh.

a Ford or a BMW?

            You get the difference between a Ford and a BMW.  The BMW is a better car.  Because all components are made of superior materials, and lengthy thought and testing has gone into the design of the mechanics, it will last long and the driving experience is exceptional.

            When it comes to food we have the same choices, between the Fords and the BMWs of foods so to speak, but.......with food the choices you make matter a whole lot more than which car you drive.  And I am not talking about caviar versus pasta.  I am talking about how a food is grown or made, what goes into it, how natural it is - you get it, its inherent quality.  Food goes inside your body, it literally becomes you.  It gives you the energy to live, promotes building and healing the cells in your body, contributes to a good immune system, feeds the brain so you can "think on your feet," and insures your overall good health.  My mother believes that she would have been taller if she didn't get inferior food during the first six crucial years of her life, the six years of WWII.

            Inferior foods, whether out of a carton and enhanced with chemicals, grown with pesticides, premade and over sugared, fed antibiotics and growth hormones, or kept and slaughtered under horrific conditions, cannot give you BMW quality health.    The consequences can be many fold.  Eating inferior foods can cause you to be more susceptible to illness in general because your body doesn't get adequate nutrition, you may tire more easily, have a troubled digestive tract, duller skin, less zest for life, think more fuzzily, become afflicted by chronic conditions, and even die younger.

            Of all the Western industrialized countries this one spends the least amount of money on food in proportion to average income - for the sake of your health, increase your food budget.   You don't need a BMW to get around, but you need superior food to live a long, healthy, and beautiful life.

making food your ally

            So many people view food as their enemy.  Whether it's the perception that fat is bad, that cholesterol clogs your arteries, that dessert is sinful, that foods that are good for you taste bad, or that all the yummy foods are bad for you.  Well, here is a list of complaints that makes food your enemy. There is a lot of bad science behind these blanket statements, and many of them have been debunked in recent years, although it is a fact that the so-called Western Diet makes us sick. It is true that eating empty calories, foods without nutritional value, will never satisfy your body and you'll keep craving and eating more in a vicious cycle.   

            How about making food your ally in building a strong and energetic body instead?  "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food," Hippocrates, the famous physician from Ancient Greece, is purported to have said.  When you learn to cook well with the foods that are healing and beneficial you'll make food your ally.  When you learn to love good food unconditionally because it is what heals your body and assures a good life you'll make food your friend.  When you become knowledgeable about the healing properties of food, the guiltless pleasures of food, you'll not only create a great hobby, but also the basis for healing the Western civilization diseases. When you learn about the good-for-you foods, and how to prepare them well so they taste delicious, you can have your cake and eat it too. 

complex shopping logistics

             Thirty, forty years ago things were simpler.  You'd go to the big supermarket to one-stop shop for most things.  We weren't worried about pesticide residue, we didn't think much about where our foods came from,  we didn't see the bigger picture of the conflict between profit and growing food sustainably, and the Western Diet hadn't blown up in our face yet.

            Nowadays I spend quite a bit of time running around to different places to fulfill my many food philosophies:  local food from local farmers to support the local economy and get the freshest possible food, produce that has not been sprayed or at least as little as possible, foods that are grown sustainably, pasture raised meat and sustainably fished seafood, eating more vegetables and lots of greens, and of course being cost conscious of the higher cost these types of food command.  It creates an intricate and more time consuming web of food related errands. 

            While we still do eat meat we eat a lot less of it and every few months I stock the freezer at a local farm where the animals graze outside all year round.  We get our raw milk and yogurt from a farm that is twenty-five miles away and have organized with several other families to take turns picking it up for the group so each of us only has to drive every other month.  Eggs come from the family whose place serves as the local weekly milk pick-up point.  Once a month our buying club gets a grocery and produce delivery from our food coop - we buy in bulk and share and save.  Some of the things I buy from the coop are bulk legumes, seeds and nuts, bulk tea and spices, condiments, nut and seed butters, also some personal care items.  Since the coop produce only lasts for about two weeks I fill in from a whole bunch of local farmers, and sometimes the supermarket.  I buy my recycled paper goods at Trader Joe's, where I also get some other organic basics such as vinegar and oils, chocolate, frozen organic spinach, and organic canned tomatoes.  Most of our supplements I order online as well as some specialty items I cannot readily find locally or through the coop (like our favorite smoky tea lapsang souchong, which our daughter humorously calls lapsang sooch).  And, believe it or not, I recently found a 5.5lb container of organic chia seeds at Walmart of all places (yes, I admit that I go there, too).

heavenly crunch

           What is it about crunchiness of all food textures that makes it so satisfying?  It's easy to eat a whole bag of potato chips (and then wonder how you did it).  Crunch is so satisfying under my teeth and hearing the crunch in my ears while I eat is addictive.  I want to feel and hear and experience it over and over and over.  I don't seem to get tired of the experience.

            Food texture and sensation is important, eating all mush is just not interesting.  There is chunky (as in roasted root vegetables or stew), there is chewy (as in meat or seitan), there is shredded (as in a raw carrot salad), there is dense (as in cooked eggs or fish or cheese), there is fluffy (as in sponge cake or some breads), there is granular (as in quinoa or rice), there is silky and smooth (as in pudding or silken tofu), there is powdery (as in different kinds of flour or powdered sugar), there is leafy (as in green vegetables), there is crispy (as in a cold fresh apple).  But crunchy is best I find. 

           Crunchy foods involve our sense of hearing in addition to our senses of taste and feeling.  Maybe that is the difference - heightened sensation.   We live for experiences.  Other than perhaps crispiness none of the other textures produce a sound.  As a kid I used to love KitKat and Crunch bars and brittle, all because of the crunch factor - now I find them too sweet.  I have been tempted to buy a food dehydrator just to make crunchy vegetable chips.  Then I can crunch away in a healthy way. 

on nut milk

           Now that lots of people are looking for alternatives to cow's milk for various reasons almond milk has become a very popular substitute.  Store bought almond milk isn't exactly cheap, nor does it taste like much.  Making your own is simple and - oh, the taste difference.  You will find a lot of information on the web on whether making your own is cheaper.  But that's really only half the story.  It's not necessarily cheaper, but what if for the same price you got a vastly superior and more nutritious nut milk?  Or for the same price as regular nut milk you got homemade organic nut milk?  In addition, you can play with a variety of nuts to make hazelnut milk (delicious), cashew milk, brazil nut milk, or walnut milk, none of which are available at the store.  Moreover, you may have read that store bought almond milk is made with only a few piddly nuts for a half gallon of nut milk.  Lastly, many nut milks are sweetened, and they contain thickeners, additives and chemicals - not so great. 

            To make nut milk simply soak a generous handful of nuts overnight (see previous post on soaking nuts, grains and seeds), rinse in the morning, blend with 4 cups/half gallon water, then strain.  You can sweeten if you must (try liquid stevia instead of sugar), add vanilla or cinnamon, but it's good as is.  What to do with the leftover bonus nut pulp?  Mix into veggie burgers, meat loaf, cookies, pie crusts, bean loaf - your imagination is the limit, but don't waste it (you can freeze it in baggies for later use).  Play with different nuts, play with the nut/water ratio, see what you like.  Oh, and you can make coconut milk by soaking shredded coconut in water, blending and straining.