Blog Archives

Negative motivation

August 26, 2011
By
Blood pressure cuff

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My blood pressure is too high.  This is a recent phenomena directly attributable to my stress eating since M. was diagnosed with breast cancer in Feb.  Now there is no choice – I must lose weight and get my blood pressure under control.  There is stroke and heart disease and diabetes in my family.

This is negative motivation.   Negative motivation can be interpreted in two ways.   It could be construed as negative emotions or behaviors. For example, a coach who motivates by pointing out flaws or belittling.  Negative motivation is also a term which refers to the negative consequences which will result from not changing behavior.   Health problems are this type of motivation.  Negative motivation can be a useful thing.

In this case, it’s certain that I can’t continue doing what I’ve been doing.   I need to eat and exercise in the ways I know will improve my health.

Kitchari/Kitcheree Recipes

July 18, 2011
By

M. has been craving Kitchari,  a traditional Ayurvedic healing bean and rice porridge. There are many variations, some more complex than others.  The general idea is to simmer the heck out of the beans and rice in order to predigest the food.  It’s given to the very ill to provide nourishment with less wear and tear on the digestive system.   Stick to plain rice and bean versions if you’re unwell.  You may consider blending the final stew to assist your digestion further.  Adding veggies is optimal, since it provides more nutrients.  Spices/herbs should be added carefully, with full consideration for what you can tolerate.

I use the kitchari recipe from Food as Medicine by Dharma Singh Khalsa.  He’s got a basic bean/rice one and a slightly more complicated one with veg and healing spices.  I’ve only made the savory vegetable one, which is what M wants.  I sprout my beans before I cook them, to make them more digestible and to make the nutrients more bio-available.  If you go that route, don’t sprout the beans into full on stir-fry style bean sprouts.  Once the tails start to poke out, they’re done.

Mung Beans & Rice (from Food as Medicine)

  • 1 cup mung beans (or 1 cup of mung beans after sprouting)
  • 1 cup basmati rice
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 inch piece of kombu seaweed (optional, adds minerals and makes beans more digestible)
  • 9 cups of water
  • 4-6 cups of assorted vegetables (carrots, celery, zucchini, broccoli, etc.)
  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • .5 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/3 cup ginger root, minced
  • 3-4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 heaping teaspoon turmeric
  • 1 heaping teaspoon garam masala
  • 1 teaspoon crushed red chilies (more or less to taste)
  • t tablespoon sweet basil
  • seeds of 5 cardamom pods
  • sea salt or Braggs Liquid Aminos to taste.

Soak beans overnight.  Wash beans and rinse rice at least 3 times. Bring water to boil.  Add bay leaves and kombu seaweed let boil over medium-high heat.  When the beans have boiled and are soft, about 40-50 minutes, add rice, lower heat to simmer, and let cook for another 20 minutes.

Clean and cut vegetables.  Add vegetables to simmering rice and beans and continue to cook for approximately 15 more minutes.  In the meantime, heat oil in large frying pan.  Add onions, ginger, and garlic.  Saute over medium high heat until brown.  Add turmeric, pepper, garam masala, and red chilies. Add this mixture to the pot with the beans and rice.  You will need to stir often now to prevent scorching.  Add sweet basil, cardamom seeds, and sea salt.  Continue to simmer for another 10 to 15 minutes, stirring often.  You may have to add extra boiling water until the rice and vegetables are completely cooked.  The consistency should be rich, thick, and soup-like — with ingredients barely discernible.

Simpler Mung Beans & Rice (from Food as Medicine)

  • .5 cup mung beans
  • .5 cup white basmati rice
  • 1 inch piece of kombu seaweed (optional)
  • 9 cups water
  • Sea salt or Bragg’s Liquid Aminos to taste

Soak beans overnight. Wash beans and rice. Bring water to a boil, add beans and kombu seaweed, and let boil over medium high heat for 40-50 minutes until soft.  Add rice and let simmer for another 20-25 minutes until done. Add sea salt to taste.  You can also add 1 tsp of ghee or olive oil per person before serving.

Caveat: I haven’t tried this recipe as written.  I’m a bit suspicious about the bean/rice to water ratio.  It looks to me like it will end up too watery.  Leave me a comment if you try it and let me know how it goes.

Zucchini & Asparagus Kitchari (VegNews, Mar/Apr 2009)

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
  • 2 teaspoons ground coriander
  • 1 teaspoon ground fennel
  • 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
  • 2 cups yellow split mung beans
  • 1.5 teaspoons salt
  • 8 cups water divided
  • 1 cup basmati rice
  • 2 cups zucchini, diced
  • 1 cup asparagus, sliced into 1 inch pieces

In a large pot, heat oil and saute cumin, coriander, fennel, and turmeric for 1 minute.  Add mung beans and salt, saute for another 2 minutes.  Add 7 cups of water and bring to a boil then simmer for 30 minutes.

Add rice, zucchini, and asparagus.  Add remaining 1 cup of water, stir, bring back to a boil, and then simmer for another 20 minutes or until rice is fully cooked.

Caveat: I haven’t made this one either but I’ve been meaning to try it. I’ve have the torn magazine page as a bookmark in Food as Medicine for over two years now.

Today’s green juice

July 18, 2011
By

I’m getting back into the swing of things with juicing.  Today’s combo: 2 cucumbers, 1/2 bunch lacinto kale, 1 granny smith apple, 1 lime, 1/2 bag of pre-washed & cut butter lettuce from Trader Joes.  Yield – 20 fl oz.  Half went to my lovely wife.

And the winner is…

July 12, 2011
By

Brother T. says he’s ordered a Hurom juicer.  Can’t wait to try it out next time I visit.

On juicing

July 5, 2011
By

I’ve promised my brother that I would post some juice recipes. He’s entertaining the idea of purchasing a juicer.  I love my Omega 8003 because it does well with the greens and wheatgrass.   I’ve also heard really good things about the Hurom.  I’m betting the Hurom juices a bit faster since it’s got a wider mouth.

The best basic green juice recipe in my opinion belongs to Cherie Soria.  I’ve touted Green Giant Juice before. It is a staple one can return to time and again. Especially if one varies the greens.  Rotation is important to prevent food sensitivities.  I love my juiced kale but also like spinach, chard, bok choy, romaine.

At Optimum Health Institute, I didn’t do any fruit juices since I was doing the “hypo” diet (as in hypoglycemic) to keep my blood sugars low. They recommend the hypo diet for anybody with a “health opportunity” (their euphemism for illness). Green juices sans fruit are bland IMHO and I remember using lots of kelp and garlic powder and/or ginger powder to give those juices some oomph.

If you are doing fruit juices, use a straw, drink them within 20 minutes, and rinse your mouth out well with water afterwards.  Otherwise the acids in the fruits can damage your teeth enamel.

Here are some of my favorite combinations

  • Watermelon with lime or lemon  (always do melons on an empty stomach and wait 20 minutes before consuming anything else)
  • Orange, carrot, ginger, spinach (looks like mud but tastes good. Put it in an opaque cup and keep the haters quiet)
  • Orange, parsley, kale, carrot
  • Pineapple, cilantro, romaine
  • Pineapple, dandelion green, zucchini or cucumber or romaine (go easy on the dandelion, it’s STRONG tasting and is a laxative)
  • Just plain cantaloupe blended in high speed blender without straining.  Yummy smoothie!!
  • Cucumber, celery, apple, mint
  • Cucumber, zucchini, celery, spinach, lemon
  • Cucumber, kale, apple
  • Celery, apple, mint
  • Cucumber, fennel

Some tips:

  • Keep the greens on the low end (like 1 or 2 leaves) to start with.  They really are an acquired taste.  Gradually you can increase the amount
  • Go easy with celery – it tastes salty, especially if you haven’t been eating salt, and can overwhelm a juice
  • Citrus cuts the “green” taste if you add too much green or just don’t like it.
  • Dinosaur (aka Lacinto) kale is less “green” tasting than the common curly variety
  • You can always add ginger, mint, pineapple mint, or other herbs for a different flavor twist.
  • Powders can also help with flavor: kelp, dulse, garlic, onion are quite useful especially if you’re not using fruit
  • Save the pulp!! There are myriad uses for veggie and fruit pulps.  Enough to merit its own blog post.  Until I get around to it, Google it. Much has been written about it on other blogs.  If you can’t use the pulp right away, put it in a labeled zip lock in the freezer.  Otherwise, composting is always a great option.

 

 

I am an urban homesteader

February 21, 2011
By
House before

Before planting

The brou-ha-ha about the Dervaes family trademarking the phrase urban homestead/er/ing. I won’t repeat the various links. I’m sure you’re all capable of putting in a web search to find the details if you’re not already familiar.

I, like thousands of others, am shocked and dismayed about the situation. I have faith, however, in the huge swell of protest. This wouldn’t be the first time that righteous outrage has closed a web site or changed a situation for the better. The people who have received the cease & desist letters are working with the EFF to rectify things. The trademark is bunk. I’m sure that there will be petitions to the USPTO to get it rescinded.

Milly and I are proto-urban homesteaders as you can see from the picture. It takes years and tons of sweat equity to get to the level the misguided would-be trade-markers have achieved with their urban homestead. The great thing about the movement is that it’s not an all-or-nothing endeavor. You do what you can and little by little you get more self sufficient. We’re currently in the process of removing our lawn and growing an edible landscape. When we moved here there was nothing on the lawn except Bermuda grass. Nothing. No plants, no landscaping. Just grass and concrete. Milly has added 20 fruit trees already. And we’re looking forward to increasing the amount of home grown fresh produce in our lives.

Today is “Green Monday” where bloggers are discussing their urban homesteading to protest the selfish and short-sighted actions of the self-proclaimed founders of the movement (which, btw, began decades if not hundreds of years ago). I’m not very fond of the term “urban homestead.” Homesteading has lots of racist and genocidal connotations so I prefer not to use it myself. I’m still virulently opposed to anybody who tries to take common English language phrases and make them inaccessible to the community which brought the terms into common usage.

Shame on them. I believe that truth and goodness will prevail.

Blast from the past

February 20, 2011
By
Feasting on Raw Foods

Feasting on Raw Foods

I found this book while out walking with my lovely wife. We happened upon a neighborhood sidewalk sale and there is was, just waiting for me to pick it up for $3.00.

It was published in 1980.  Decades before the modern raw foods movement blossomed.  It has a few chapters about the health reasons for going raw.  It quotes the Viktoras Kulvinskas, the grandfather of raw foods (he worked with Ann Wigmore). Unfortunately it also contains recipes for raw meat and dairy.  Not really this vegetarian’s cup of tea.  Ok, maybe the dairy a little bit. I’m still working on that.

It’s a cool little curiosity piece. I doubt I’ll use it very much. It does show the long history of the raw foods movement and I got a kick out of it.

Magick menu love

February 6, 2011
By

I’ve been playing with the Magick Menu this weekend.   And loving it!

My background makes me predisposed to love this new service being rolled out by Natalie Lussier a.k.a. The Raw Foods Witch. I love raw food.  I love databases (part of my day job).   The Magick Menu marries a database of raw food recipes with an intuitive user interface for quickly selecting a week’s meals and generating a shopping list. It’s all my favorite things! How awesome is that?

I signed up for a free trial week.   And got too busy to test it.  I saw my card charged auto-renew when the trial ended.  Oops. I decided to keep it for a month and prioritize making time to use it.  The lovely wife is training for a 150 mile ride in Death Valley at the end of the month.  And she’s very interested in powering her training with green juices for her final weeks of training & tapering. I would like for us to do a 5 day green-drinks challenge.  Opportunity is knocking to see how the tool holds up to managing a 2-person 5 day green liquids diet challenge.

This afternoon I began planning.  I logged into my Magick Menu account, and started poking around.  The site is WordPress driven so it has robust open source software back-end.  Another bonus! I am ardent supporter of Open Source software and regularly make use of it as a matter professional principle.  My day-gig involves managing a team administering the Open Source ePrints repository for a major research university

I found it very easy to find recipes, drag and drop them onto a weekly schedule, save the menu to my account library (cool! save even more time by re-using), and print out a shopping list of ingredients .   The best part was saving to PDF.   The PDF is rendering in a simple, easily printable form which won’t drain my paper & toner reserves.  The layout is a plain menu grid at the top of the page, then a bullet-point shopping list, and, best of all, the full recipes for the week.  I made a menu of green juices & smoothies, plus some heavily green raw veggie soups.

I spoke to the wife, and she’s good to go with the juicing.  We need to do the grocery run, and make juices in the evening for the following day.  I don’t know if we’ll start tomorrow or Tuesday.  We have Superbowl social obligations today and time may not allow for shopping and juicing today.

You can contribute your own recipes to the Magick Menu data set and comment/review on recipes added by others.  There aren’t a lot of recipes in the library yet.  That’s not a totally bad thing.  Browsing is easier with less recipes to look at.  I can imaging spending a lot of time surfing recipes once a critical mass of recipes is available – they will look so yummy that  I’ll get happily lost in the food-porn.  The number of recipes will only get bigger once more people join the community and begin contributing.

I haven’t added any of my own recipes yet.  There is a form-based interface for typing in your information.  It accepts simple text and some HTML tags.  You use pull-down menus to do some basic social tagging.  The nerd in me ponders if the The Raw Food Witch has plans for optimizing tags.  I think about how social tags are combined with controlled vocabularies to optimize search engine results.  The search engine appears to be keyword full text indexing based.  I can’t tell if it includes any sort of ranking in the results set displayed.  There isn’t any advanced search available.   As the corpus increases, it would be rad to customize your recipe searches based on indexes of controlled fields.  Sorry…geeking out there….

What I would love is a batch ingest function so I could import all  of my MacGoumet recipes.  I’m a lazy data entry girl.

I’ve got my shopping list and menu in-hand.  Now what I need to test is my ability to apply the tool at hand.  It’s one thing to plan, it’s another to do.  If this menu helps me stick to a juice fast for 5 days I’ll be a total convert.  I’ll keep you posted.

Buckwheaties

February 5, 2011
By
Soaked buckwheat groats

Soaked buckwheat groats

Sprouted buckwheat cereal is a raw foodie standard.  It is soooooo easy.  And it is soooooo economical.  It’s usually called “buckwheaties” or raw granola (RAW-nola) by those in the know.  Usually they’re around $9.00-$10.00 per pound.  Outrageous! Raw hulled buckwheat costs a buck or so for a few pounds.  I’d estimate you can make it yourself for under $5.  And you can have whatever flavor you imagine.

There isn’t really a hard & fast recipe for this because it lends itself to improvisation & variation.  It’s fun to think of new ways to make it.

Step 1 – Soak & sprout hulled buckwheat groats

  • Put your buckwheat in 2-3x the amount of water.  This stuff expands a LOT.  Make sure all of the sprouts are under the water.   I usually use 1 cup of groats and 4 cups of H2O.
  • Soak 20-60 minutes. Don’t over soak! If you do, they will not sprout.  The water will become very thick, cloudy, and starchy.  This is normal. You’ll know they’re ready when they get to be 2-3 times their original size. You won’t have much extra water in your bowl.
  • Put groats in a colander and rinse them thoroughly.  You’ll need to do it 2 or 3 times until the water runs clear.  This is very important.  If you don’t rinse well, your spouts will have a bit of a bitter taste.   Drain the groats thoroughly when done.
  • Spread the groats out evenly in your colander
  • Set them out away from direct sunlight and let them sprout for 4-8 hours.  Room temperature should be around 70 degrees.  Amount of time you set them out will vary. If it’s hotter, leave them out for less time.  If it’s colder, leave them out for more.
  • Rinse and drain again.  Sprout them again for 4-8 hours.  Repeat 2-3 more times.
  • You will see tiny tails emerging from the groats.   For buckwheaties, a wee hint of a tail is sufficient.
  • You are done with step 1!!!  You will have roughly 3-4 times the volume of what you started with.  For 1 cup raw groats, I get a yield of 3-4 cups sprouted groats.

Step 2 - Flavor your cereal

This is the part where you can get creative.  Put in your flavorings and a sweetener.  Mix thoroughly.  Some combinations I like with my 3-4 cups sprouted groats are:

  • Chocolate!! Mix the groats with  1/4 to 1/2 cup of semi- raw chocolate syrup. Sometimes I sprinkle in shredded coconut and make a “Mounds” flavored cereal. You could probably use a nut butter to make a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup type of flavor.  I’ve been meaning to try that!   To make raw chocolate syrup:
    • Blend 1 cup maple syrup and 6 tablespoons raw cacao powder in a high speed blender.  Good on raw ice cream, as a fruit dip, etc.   If you want to make it all raw, use agave, runny honey, or, my personal favorite, soaked dates made into a watery paste/syrup works very well)
  • Apple cinnamon – mix groats with 1/4-1/2 cup of raw applesauce and sprinkle with cinnamon.  Add some sweetener if you desire.  Sometimes add diced apple for some more texture.  You can also add raisins, dried berries, cranberries.
  • Nuttin’ honey – 1/4 – 1/2 cup almond or other nut butter, 1/4 cup honey.
  • Granola – add nuts, fruit, whatever you’d use in granola, plus a sweetener to bind it all together.  I recommend date paste.
  • Leave them plain! They’re quite good simply left alone without flavorings.  If you do this, definitely go the Grape-Nuts route.  If I do this, I intend to use them as a textural element in other recipes such as cookies and pie crusts.

Step 3 – Dehydrate!!!

Your batter should be fairly sticky but still spreadable.

  • Spread the batter onto dehydrator trays using teflex sheets.
  • Decide if you want to make your buckwheaties structured or as a free-running Grape-Nuts type of cereal.   To make it structured, score a grid patter on the batter to make bite-sized squares.   If you want Grape-Nutty cereal, simple spread it out on they tray.
  • Flip the sheet of buckwheat over and dry the other side until the whole things is dried out.
  • For buckwheat squares, use your spatula to neatly break apart the bite-sized squares.  For Grape-Nutties, use your hands to crumble it all apart into tiny nuggets which will readily pour out of your storage container.  Or leave it kind of chunky like granola.

Step 4 – Store

Put the cereal in an airtight container.  It will keep a few months in a cool dark spot.  It will keep virtually forever if you put it in the fridge or freezer.  If it starts going stale it may get a bit soft/sticky.  You can revive it by throwing it back in the dehydrator to dry it out some more.

Step 5 – Enjoy!

Buckwheaties have so much versatility.  Eat it as is for a snack.  It packs well.   Use it as a breakfast cereal with your favorite nut or seed milk.   Let it soak with other ingredients for a muesli.  Sprinkle it on raw ice cream.  Add it to raw coconut yogurt.  Throw it into a raw cookie recipe.  Use it in a pie crust (grind to a flour or put it together like a graham cracker crust).

I usually have 2 or 3 varieties of buckwheaties on hand as a pantry staple.  I make a batch every 4-5 weeks as part of my monthly food prep.  Having them on-hand allows me to make “fix it fast” recipes.

Roll call!

February 5, 2011
By

Yay! I’ve noticed some people registering for accounts on RawHabit who don’t appear to be spam bots.  So I can get an idea who you are, would you please leave me a comment and let me get to know you?  I’d be pretty thrilled about it.

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