seasonally unadapted

We have been without air conditioning for a bit over a week and it may be another week until the replacement part makes its appearance.  Besides slower thinking, general sluggishness, clumpy salt and chewy crackers, the heat has had an immediate effect on my cooking, or rather lack thereof.  

Summer is always the season of lighter meals, but air conditioning permitted me to still do a fair amount of cooking - just because I could.  Not now!  Raw food diet - salads and more salads, some precooked legumes from the freezer for protein, an egg here and there (doesn't heat up the kitchen too much to cook an egg), a lot of Caprese (mozzarella/tomato) and lots of fresh fruit. And my endless thirst for hot tea all day long has given way to glasses and glasses of cold water.  Perhaps I should have tried out that raw food diet I experimented with in February of all months, when I was looking to reboot my system rather - see a post on it.  But with the heat I just don't have the energy to experiment wildly, and my cooking adventurousness and eagerness to try out new recipes has slowed with rising temperatures. 

It's amazing how quickly we lose touch with the connection to nature when we live in an artificial environment.  The effect and character of the seasons flattens out.  Diet and cooking flatten out, the biggest contrasts between summer and winter cooking diminish.  On the other hand, my connection to these last few hot days of late summer has increased. 

Unfortunately, our business oriented culture is relentless and does not permit us a slower paced summer. Business must go on.  Yes, we are gaining comfort with air conditioning, we are gaining the ability to conduct business no matter what it's like outside, but we are also losing connection to nature and the seasonal differences, and the starker contrasts that come with it.  

eat your vegetables, all of it

When people complain about the price of organic vegetables I mention the waste that comes from believing that certain parts of a vegetable are superior to others. Broccoli crowns, portabello mushroom caps, watermelon flesh, or asparagus tops come to mind.  What happens to the portabello stems, broccoli stalks, watermelon rind, or woody asparagus ends?  All in the trash?  This makes your vegetables a lot more expensive because someone has to discard half of it, either you or the grower. 

Making use of every bit of vegetable or animal instead of dividing it into desirable/edible versus undesirable/inedible parts also reflects a greater respect for nature.  I have previously written that Americans don't eat offal, the way other cultures do and the way I grew up, tagging it as undesirable - see here on nose to tail.  What happens to the rest of this precious animal that gave its life so we could live?  But why? These parts are not inedible!  

Not only do we have to overproduce vegetables when we use only half of them, we waste money, and we lose the nutrients from the other vegetable parts (think carrot root versus carrot top; radish or turnip root versus radish or turnip tops - please eat all these tops).  There is no inherent need to peel most of your organic vegetables, after all you don't peel your cherries or apricots either!  There are exceptions as some peels can indeed be coarse, such as on turnips, beets, or kohlrabi - your choice here; asparagus ends are too woody to eat, onion and garlic peel is papery, and peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant peel has those lectins in them - roast these nightshades and remove the peel if you're sensible to them.  Peeling is also a different story with conventional produce whose outer layer has come into contact with pesticides and has grown in contaminated soil.  But for heaven's sake eat the turnip/beet/carrot/radish/kohlrabi greens. 

Sweet potatoes roasted and eaten in their entirety are delicious and the peel adds much needed fiber to your diet.  When preparing stuffed portabello mushrooms I chop the stems and add them to the filling.  Woody asparagus ends get cooked and blended for a creamy soup (my Vitamix does wonders with the fibery ends).  Watermelon rind can be added to a smoothie, or makes for a delicious refreshing summer drink when juiced with a squeeze of lemon.  Peeled broccoli stems are delicious and tender - chop and add them right into whatever else you're making with the crowns, or make a raw broccoli slaw from the stems only.   All peels, including onion, sad looking greens tops past their prime, celery or carrot ends, broccoli stem peels, go into a pot of water and make a nutrient rich vegetable stock - perfect as a soup base (freeze the stock for later).

Lengthen your food dollars, honor all vegetable parts, and respect nature's bounty without wasting it.  Food is precious.

a better lunch

Deli take-out lunches not only cost a lot of money, they are also not necessarily the healthiest choice, what with the bun, all that Deli meat, the bag of chips, and the soda that often goes with it.  Or that "salad bar" that tempts with prepared foods, Chinese or otherwise - oops, forgot about the salad part.  And don't get me started on those fantasy coffee drinks with whipped cream and flavored syrups, the reward for being away from home all day.  Very expensive if you add the cost up over a year, and not exactly beneficial to your health or weight.  

My preferred lunch is leftovers, vegetable leftovers that is.   Since having made a conscious effort to eat more plant-based foods I always prepare a lot of different vegetable dishes, and always enough so we have leftovers. And another thing, I try to keep animal protein, on those days we have some, to dinnertime.  Hence most of my lunches are vegetarian.

Whether you're packing a lunch to take to work, making school lunches for your kids (they've got to be better than school cafeteria food), or eating close to your fridge at your home office, vegetarian leftovers lunches are prepared in a jiffy, are easy on your wallet, your health, and your weight.  

food joys

We learn best by doing, and that can be through either joyful or painful experiences. Both have their merits, although the former is of course a whole lot more pleasant than the latter.  

Eating my way through Europe as a child I experienced food as exciting - that each meal is a discovery, and that the best times can be had while sitting around a table, tasting, chatting, musing, and discussing.  First I learned by watching my parents - shopping, cooking (my mom more than my dad), baking (my dad more than my mom), putting menus together (my mom), selecting wines (my dad), and entertaining (both together).  As a teenager I began to cook and bake on my own.  Later I became interested in finding out where my food came from - in what soil it was grown, how it was raised or in what waters it swam, with what care, or lack thereof, it was prepared, and the French notion of terroir (here a post on that).  In more recent years I have come to realize that food can heal you (let food be thy medicine, an earlier post), but also make you sick.   Food is one of the most important aspects of my life because it nourishes both the cells of my physical body as well as my soul.  

My positive experiences around food have informed my life enormously and food is one of my favorite forms of pastime and entertainment.  From dysfunctional food experiences, on the other hand, you learn "how not to," which in turn can motivate you to find out "how to." Perhaps you experienced food as a reward system.  "No dessert until you finish what's on your plate," teaches that dessert is the best part, and to want that the most (hint, hint - sugar craving).   Perhaps you experienced food as a substitute for something else.  The quintessential American movie scene of drowning your sorrows in a tub of ice cream, alone in front of the television, shows the displacement of the need for love and connection to something sweet (more sugar cravings here).   The same goes for comfort foods, which also fill a need other than hunger.  Maybe there wasn't enough food to go around when you were younger, and the experience of lack caused you to overeat later on and wanting more than enough.  Casually dropped parent comments on clothing and food, especially towards girls, and reinforced by the advertising industry, have twisted girls' body images for decades.  This in turn created an obsessive dieting culture and produced guilt feelings around food.  "That'll make me fat."  A lot of misinformation around cholesterol, fat, sugar, dairy, meat, eggs, and salt, much of it deliberately spread over the past half century, has caused an enormous amount of confusion around what is healthy and what is not.

Once you are aware of how your beliefs around food play out in your life you can begin to dig deeper.  The healing process begins by replacing the false or dysfunctional beliefs with positive ones one by one so that those eventually crowd out the counterproductive ones.  Let the food joy begin! 

CSAing

Just picked up my first CSA share of the season.  I didn't do it in a long time because I liked the freedom to buy wherever, whenever. But this year I wanted to support Jeff and Adina Bialas, local farmers who do an organic share close to home, and who are known to grow a wide variety of vegetables.

CSA, or community supported agriculture, is a social agricultural model.  At the beginning of the season you prepay a share of the season's crops, thereby helping to finance the farmer's expenses at the beginning of the season.  Because you pay upfront crop failure and weather related risks are minimized from a financial perspective for the farmer, and the risks are spread.  If the season is prolific everyone profits and you get a more generous share each week.

About twenty years ago, together with several other moms, I signed up for a working share on a biodynamic farm, all our kids in tow.  It was a lot of work for us moms, a lot of fun for the kids (play, warm cherry tomatoes right off the plant, running along the rows of vegetables, sitting under a big old tree and enjoying playmates and snacks), and an amazing abundance of vegetables each week.  That's when I learned to process tons of fresh bulk vegetables quickly lest they perish - eat, blanch, freeze, eat more, cook a lot.  Should have known about green smoothies then.  Oh well, live and learn.  Here an earlier related post on local food relationships.

This week's beginning share was modest because of the long, cold spring.  We got small bunches of kale and asparagus, beets, lettuce, herbs, young garlic, a small bunch of rhubarb, and two potted herbs.  Can't wait to see what next week brings.  I feel good supporting one particular organic farmer instead of the local supermarket.

where's the farmer?

Do you know the chickens that lay your eggs?  Do you know in what condition they live?  Do you know what they eat? Do you know the farmer who grows your vegetables?  Do you know about his methods?  Do you know about his soil?  Do you get your vegetables as soon as they are harvested? Do you know where your meat comes from (if you eat meat)?  Have you chatted with the farmer who runs the farm?  Do you know his practices?  Have you seen how the animals live?  Are treated? Find their end?  

In former times we knew how all of this worked. Then we lost touch because we went shopping at the supermarket.  But when the kids start to believe that eggs, or meat, or apples come from the supermarket it's time to go visit a farm and talk to the farmer.

deep eating

Just learned about intuitive eating.  It's a thing. But it's sort of what I've been doing forever, and I didn't know there was a term for it.  I never liked the diet mentality, depriving myself according to specific rules and regulations, counting calories (here an earlier post, "stop counting calories"), or labeling foods as good or bad.  I've also never liked the sensation of being so full that it doesn't feel good anymore.  

Having grown up in food cultures I love food and have never felt guilty about enjoying it, or the need to binge on ice cream or sweets. But I "intuitively" used to eat a lot more bread and pasta, pizza (homemade) and baked stuff (homemade). Could never figure out a way to get rid of those ten baby pounds I put on after having my children.  Until I became a little more explorative, inquisitive, and informed about nutrition and my body's particular needs.  Now I eat lots of vegetables, especially greens, very little bread and grains, small amounts of animal protein and dairy, and very little sugar or natural sweeteners, but a fair amount of fats and lots of avocados. I'm not a big fan of fruit, but find citrus in a winter salad, or roasted pears with olive oil, salt and pepper delicious.  I also love those antioxidant berries, and a banana here and there to add variety to my green smoothies.  And I take sea vegetables, bee pollen, spirulina, and cacao beans as supplements because our soils, even organic soils, are depleted, and the micronutrients and minerals our body needs to repair our cells must come from somewhere. But that's what works for me.  Your needs will be different.

Intuitive eating heals the dieting mind and the good food/bad food guilt trips, but is only a stepping stone to a much deeper conversation with your body on what you thrive on.  And that requires a bit of nutritional understanding, acknowledging the state of our agriculture, and listening in to how your body feels after certain foods.  Your constitution is unique, your body's needs are unique.  Deep eating evolves out of a combination of science and intuition.

decisions, decisions

To me nothing is more important than nourishing my body and soul by cooking from scratch with the most healthful ingredients, sitting down for dinner, and enjoying the food and the company.  Food always came before soccer, but then I grew up in food cultures. 

I know, decisions, decisions. Take-out most nights of the week?  A sandwich on the way to the kids' game? Ready-made food from the supermarket? TV dinners (no, I think those are out - the new alternative is pre-assembled ingredients in a box - dinner making make believe)? 

The sitting-down-together part of a meal is really important, and is mostly hindered by late working hours and kids' sports activities, according to Laurie Tarkan's article in a NYT article from 2005 that is still relevant.  The other part that is just as important is the ingredients.  I know the ingredients of my from-scratch dinners, but I'm suspicious of the ingredients in take-out food, prepared foods, and even those mail order gourmet meals.  They are all a big compromise.  Decisions, decisions.  

Quality food, and how you eat it, is THE most basic and important health ingredient because it is the basis for supporting your immune system and rebuilding your damaged cells (quality in - quality out).  Stress, rushing around, and eating your food on the run compromise your health - see a recent 2016 US News article on that.   Decisions, decisions.  But what are you with compromised health?  

going green

I'm my own guinea pig when it comes to experimenting with making food my medicine, and I gobble up all of the latest and greatest information on healing with food.  Having arrived at the low cal/low carb diet as a pretty good diet on which I've lost weight and feel good, then having experimented with gluten-free, the Plant Paradox diet, and most recently an only-raw-fruits-and-vegetables cleanse for almost a month, all those without extreme healing experiences and finding them quite restrictive - I'm now on to something else.

Green for Life had been sitting on my shelf for a while, but the universe sent me another message via a friend.  Go green!  Victoria Boutenko documents her extensive research into the importance of greens in this classic.  She reports that almost 50% of the wild chimpanzees' diet, whose genetic make-up is closest to ours, consists of greens - hint, hint.  In her Roseburg Study she supplied participants with one quart of green smoothies every day for a month, while asking them to stay on whatever diet they were on.  Lo and behold - amazing healing experiences were recorded after only a month of this easy regime, all documented in her book. 

Greens offer incredible nutritional concentration and complexity.  But greens in their raw form are not terribly appealing, and hard to chew, especially in the quantities that would truly be of significance.  Moreover, their nutrients can only be properly absorbed if their cell walls are broken down, and our teeth are not doing a very good job at that. Thus, the trick to ingesting more greens, and making the nutrients accessible, is to drink them in smoothie form.  This breaks the cell walls down, and the blender permits you to play with fruit and vegetable combinations that make them delicious.  While vegetable juices are good because the nutrients are easily accessible, smoothies are better because they add the fiber that helps to clean out waste and toxins.  In addition, greenies raise the hyrochloric acid level in your stomach which "contributes to better absorption of nutrients, decreases the possibility of infection, heals allergies, and improves overall health," as Boutenko writes.  Finally, the increase of greens in your diet makes the body more alkaline, which is another element that promotes healing (overacidification of the body chemistry leads to cancer and inflammation - see an earlier post on that).

We've been playing - bananas, blueberries, greens - greens, garlic, sundried tomatoes - greens, lime, tomato - greens, celery, lemon, tomato, avocado.  The more diverse your choice of greens the better.  Remember that the tops of carrots, beets, turnips, or kohlrabi are greens too.  If you live in the countryside you can go foraging when the weather gets better - for lambs quarters, wild dandelion greens, purslane, nettles, wild thyme, or onion grass.  Greens also include herbs.  I've been buying lots of parsley, cilantro, and dill because they add another dimension to the kale/chard/mustard greens/lettuce/dandelion conversation.  One last bit.  Organic greens are better than conventional greens because the more mineral rich the soil is your produce grew in, the more nutrient rich the greens, and the better your health  (see a post on yummy soil).  I will report back in a month. 

a matter of attitude

My husband and I recently did an almost-28-day only-raw-fruits-and-vegetables cleanse (inspired by Anthony William in  Medical Medium).  Going cold turkey from warming winter comfort foods to eating only raw fruits and vegetables in the middle of winter is no piece of cake.  No glass of wine to reward myself either.  Cleanse was the idea.  I had an attitude, and felt deprived and pretty sorry for myself.  The cleanse was also antisocial - no winter dinner spread would have enough raw foods to satisfy our eccentric temporary diet.   On top of that came the steep learning curve of switching to raw cuisine overnight.  They do a lot with red peppers and cashew nuts.   And we were supposed to have fruit smoothies in the morning.  Coming from northern Europe I like my breakfasts savory - fish, eggs, ham, avocado, all good - banana/blueberry/date smoothies - too sweet for me.

So my attitude just wasn't there, and I was disappointed that I didn't see/feel/experience any amazing changes right away - whether clarity of mind, clearer skin, my graying hair back to brown, requiring less sleep, or other miracles (all in the literature about the benefits of a raw food diet mind you).   To the cleanse's credit I have to say that my husband reported a clearer mind and some weight loss. 

Then I read RAW: The Uncook Book.  Juliano Brotman, its author, prefaces the book with the statement that he is not eating raw for all the obvious health reasons but for "Taste and pleasure and only taste and pleasure."  Maybe you have to live in a warm climate to be so obviously enthusiastic about raw foods.  Maybe my attitude prevented me from experiencing the wow effects.  Maybe we would have had to pull this through for several months or do this during the summer. 

The best from this raw adventure is that I picked up some new techniques to add to my uncooking repertoire - mixing raw mushrooms with soaked sunflower seeds and chopped carrots as a stuffing; puréeing soaked cashews into a smooth crème that can become the base for all sorts of things (from faux whipped cream to faux pâté ingredient); adding a whole raw red pepper to vinaigrette ingredients and blending it all into a truly delicious salad dressing.  In addition, the colors of our meals were always technicolor. 

I am on to the healing powers of green smoothies now.  Victoria Boutenko, author of Green For Life, reports in her Roseburg Study that participants drank a quart of green smoothies each day for a month while maintaining their regular diets, and reported amazing improvements in their health and disposition.  That seems pretty easy to do.  According to Boutenko we all suffer from low stomach acidity and fiber deficiency in our diet, which lead to a host of symptoms.  Let's see what this next adventure in healthfulness brings.