I'm back baby!

Like the man says, I'm back. It's been about 21/2 years since my last post, but I want to talk about food again. Thing is, my attitude has changed.

Ironically, or perhaps predictably given my husband’s predilection for food, I am looking at food only as a fuel source these days. I had an excellent chance to experiment with this recently, when I stayed in a dorm while attending a residency program.

The kitchen there was basic; fridge, sink, microwave, kettle and toaster. They supplied cutlery and plates etc but no food. We were quite busy during the residency and I wanted to make sure to eat right, so I shopped for quick, nutritious, no-stove meals. For two weeks I ate simply, and only for hunger. I didn’t have time, or the inclination, to eat junk food. I often studied while eating, which made me eat very slowly because I was distracted. Looks the same but is the polar opposite to mindlessly shoveling mountains of garbage in your mouth while reading.

My fabulous lunch - Tom Yum Goong (a la Lucinda)

I went for a spectacular run today – suddenly I’m running faster than I ever have for more than a block at a time.

Then I had an appointment and realised far too late I’d forgotten to eat breakfast. I was hungry.

On the way home I imagined what I would have for lunch. I need to be careful what I eat on an empty stomach, so I prefer light and easy to digest. Because my food is my health, and what I eat first sets the tone for the rest of the day, I like to keep it healthful and energizing.

Mushroom Burgers

Darn! I forgot to photograph them. I often do because they smell so good that we're always anxious to eat, then we get distracted with condimentization. (It is so a word)

We get those big mushrooms that are essentially overgrown button mushrooms, dab a bit of olive or grapeseed oil on, and broil them until juicy, about five or ten minutes.

Meanwhile, I sauteed half a large sweet onion. We ate our burgers in portuguese buns fresh from the local bakery. Sides included baby gherkins, calamata olives, raita, and a salad of celery apple carrot and roasted almonds.

What a great meal; easily digestible by our evening taekwondo workout, and pretty healthy.

Giving up cream

The day I never thought would happen has come to pass. My religious beliefs are not many, but definitely include cream in my coffee. Not milk, not whitener – cream. Give me cream or give me death! Or herbal tea.

A friend of mine once told of a promising romance that was brewing. Unfortunately she had to end it when she found out he took skim milk in his coffee. Milk in an emergency, but skim milk… well that’s just not the sort of man you’d consider as a father to your children. Clearly not of sound mind.

You may by now understand how important cream is to my coffee, and coffee is to me. So for me now to eschew cream in favour of soy milk – yes soy milk – may seem improbable.

Years ago a friend, recently arrived from Iran, told me that when he first got here he noticed that many people smelled of rotting milk. I had never considered that, but I started noticing it myself.

I like to experiment with foods to optimize my mind and body, so I read a lot about health and nutrition. Whenever an idea resonates with me, I try it to see if it works for my body.

I’ve read many articles about cow’s milk being less healthy than it was thought to be when I was growing up, so I decided to ingest less milk and milk products.

Cutting down on my milk consumption became rather easy. I drink a lot less cow’s milk than I did as a kid, although once in a while I still crave chocolate milk, straight from the carton. Ahh, a summertime treat.

Cheese is like candy for me, so I buy it only on occasion. I can eat a Costco-sized container of swiss cheese in two days, which, apart from being expensive doesn’t quite fit into my “all things in moderation” diet. And it kind of, ahem, slows the digestive process. A lot. Like, do that before a road trip and you can avoid gas station bathrooms between Connecticut and LA.

The only thing I couldn’t find a substitute for was cream in my coffee. Milk just doesn’t cut it. If milk’s all that’s available, I’d rather not have coffee, but given my commitment to caffeine addiction*, not a serious alternative. Tried those artificial whiteners but I don’t like foodstuffs that are made in a lab. It’s a prejudice, I know.

So finally I tried sweetened soy milk. It’s delicious! Soy milk’s density gives me that thick creaminess I seek, and it takes away the bitterness – mine and the coffee’s. Although I’ve never taken sugar in my coffee, the sweetness adds to the richness I crave.

So Jacquie, I hope we can still be friends. I promise to keep cream on hand when you’re in town. And I promise never to switch to non-fat….

(* I joke about my caffeine addiction but in seriousness, have recognized the effects of caffeine on my brain and body. I buy both caf and decaf beans. When I grind them, I mix the beans 1:2 so that I am drinking one-third caf. I drink two cups a day; three on weekends.)

Kabocha squash soup

Made with the leftover squash from christmas day dinner, and stock made from the chicken carcass. The soup was amazing! Sweet, thick and delicious. I added nothing but a bit of sea salt and a couple ounces of ginger tea. There are several sickies in the house right now - a cold/fluey thing and it seems to help them feel better.

The soup doesn't photograph well without fancy plating and a garnish, but it was one of the best soups I've made or eaten, and I've had soup so good it made me cry. (That was on my 30th birthday at a late lamented soup cafe run by two sisters and their mom in Kitsilano - anyone remember the name of it?)

The original fruit by the metre*

*small canadian joke

Have you seen that very scary bright red shiny plastic-looking stuff that's supposed to be good for you called fruit by the foot or fruit roll-ups? To which are added sugars, flavours and dyes but is marketed as if it were capital-H healthy? Woo, so it's high in vitamin C - I ask you what's not high in vitamin C these days? If you live and eat in north america, you'd have to work pretty hard to get less than your rda of vitamin C. If vitamin C is a food's biggest claim, then perhaps it's not worth the money. And to repeat myself, I try to buy food not made by machines.

When I was a girl, my mum baked a lot and one of our treats was when she peeled apples. We'd gather round begging for peels and hoping for the longest unbroken string, enjoying succulent flavours and the often-crunchy freshness. We'd marvel at mum's dexterity with the peeler; something almost impossible for our small and untrained hands.

As I got older and learned to work a peeler, I took pride in each apple peeled in a single string. Now my kids watch in amazement and fight over the peels.

Fresh apple peels have it all - nutritious, delicious, ephemeral, seasonal. They are beautiful and varied, fun to play with and easy to eat, and best of all you can eat the wrapping.

Apple crumble for breakfast

after dinner we have it with whipped cream

I believe that each day is a gift and should be celebrated as such. So today, a school holiday for the kids, we had popovers and apple crumble for breakfast. But wait a minute, you say, apple crumble is a dessert and as such neither healthy nor a desirable way to start the day.

Before you allow this kneejerk response to carry the day, let's compare. Bacon and eggs is not a bad breakfast, but what's in your bacon? Apart from all the salt and smoke (even natural smoke isn't good for you), there's a lot of protein.

Cereal? Don't get me started. There's either tons of sugar, or kids add it. And not much protein or flavour. In most cereals, almost all of the calories are from fat or carbohydrates. All those carbs get you going but you crash an hour later. The milk saves the day, nutritionally speaking.

Pancakes aren't much better, and if you're picking up breakfast from a drive-thru window you're just kidding yourself. (Nutritionally as well as the dis-healthiness of eating on the run, oblivious to your food and body.)

I recently read an article by a fitness consultant who said she eats dessert only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has cut all other sugar out of her diet.

Blek. How over-regulated and well, dull. Life is a celebration - eat dessert every day. And as the old saying goes, life is uncertain - eat your dessert first. I reward myself for all the hard work I do and energy I expend in service by eating well and loving what I eat.

So popovers with apple crumble: using Bittman's recipes from How to Cook Everything they contain eggs, milk, flour, oats, brown sugar, six cups of apples, six tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon or less of white sugar, salt and cinnamon. Not bad.

Not made by machines or kept warm under heat lamps. Not dried out and tasteless but warming and desirable. Textures were great: the apples were softened with a bit of not-quite-crunch in the middle, oat topping was crunchy, the popovers their usual combination of doughy and crispy. (One of my big complaints about machine-made food is textural blandness.)

Each kid ate about the equivalent of one egg and one apple, and I'm sure less flour than a piece of toast. They loved it and felt very special to have such a 'decadent' breakfast. Lovely. Now isn't that what life's all about?

Sick Day

I had a terribly dramatic-sounding cold last week, so I stayed home bundled on the couch, drinking ginger tea and watching Mary Tyler Moore. I made myself an easy to digest, healthy lunch of cheese sandwich, clear tomato soup and cantaloupe chunks. How healthy, how delicious and how fortifying. I'm better now and able to go running again. I'm sure it's due to that soup!

Rainy Day Fish Soup-Stew (Stoup) with baby eggplants

Baby eggplants are so cute! I added them to my fish (tilapia), chicken stock, and leftover roast veggies, along with a couple ounces of ginger tea, some lemon ponzu, salt and pepper, and a sprinkling of herbes de province. I  put it all in the slow cooker for a few hours (maybe four or five).

It's good food for our first wintery day of the fall - it's been dark and rainy all day, chilly for the first time, and most of our family have colds. I'm having some medicinal tequila and ginger tea - if you've gotta be sick, might as well make it fun!

This soup will give us a blast of easily-digestible protein, along with vitamin C from the veggies, and of course the scientifically-proven antibiotic benefits of chicken stock. I used a bag of stock from my freezer, and a frozen filet.

It looks good and tastes great. I'm just cooking some spatzle for those who want to add noodles to their soup.

[update] It's good - the eggplants seem to add umami to the broth. One of my kids had a friend over for supper. They all ate tons and some even came back for seconds - pretty good for a fish & vegetables dish; most people wouldn't be able to make it likeable for kids without resorting to decoration or fatification (adding whipped cream, cheese shapes etc).

Kids like healthy food and don't need to be bribed with cheese-stuffed crusts or cutesy cutouts on top of their food. They like a variety of flavours and are happy and proud to know what they eat and that they eat well.

starting out: frozen stock and fish

Garlic Shrimp, Roasted Veg and corn on the cob

Tonight’s supper was a somewhat odd mix of garlic shrimp, roasted winter vegetables and corn on the cob. It was delicious and extremely nutritious. I added as much garlic and onion as possible, hoping to counteract the effects of the cold we all seem to have.

I hate getting sick – it interrupts my fitness regime! – and so I try to eat myself back to health. Garlic, onion and ginger help cleanse the blood. Root vegetables and corn are high in vitamin C, contain water and provide roughage - useful for a body that’s slightly dehydrated by a cold.

The vegetables were yams, sweet potatoes, carrots, mushrooms and garlic, rough-cut to cubes or slices, in the case of the carrots, and tossed in olive oil. I placed them in a cast-iron skillet, added enough chicken stock to about one inch deep, and sprinkled coarse salt over top. I love the flavours of roasted veg, and since the tastes can be subtle, I used no other flavourings. Roasted them on 450f for about 45 minutes.

And the shrimp, well shrimp in garlic just makes life that much more enjoyable. I sauteed onions and garlic in butter, then added the shrimp and some chopped fresh herbs (basil, lavender, oregano, thyme). Cooked it for a few minutes (I use cooked frozen shrimp in a resealable bag from Costco - good shrimp at a good price, and super practical to have around in the freezer for two-minute meals.)

To drink we had what we call Ginger Water – it’s ginger tea poured over ice cubes to cool the temperature and mitigate the heat of the ginger.

The corn was really tasty - sweet, fresh and succulent. Even with a cold I could taste it. Yum. We don't add butter or salt to corn. I always did until ten years ago, when I tasted fresh peaches and cream corn with no topping. My life changed and I stopped the knee-jerk salting and buttering that goes on in many north american diets.

If you use enough salt when you cook, none needs to be added at the table. Cooking vegetables for less time - until they are cooked but still crunchy (in the case of carrots and broccoli, for example) allows them to retain their texture and more flavour.

You also have to train the diners in your life to bring awareness to eating. I do this by discussing what's in each dish. It's a kind of contest for the kids, and they take great pride in naming every last ingredient, including herbs and seasonings. We also discuss the nutritional value of each dish, so they are learning to combine ingredients for healthy deliciousness.

Teaching those you love to enjoy the flavours of the actual foods, not salt and butter, is a lasting legacy that can help keep them healthy, conscious and empowered. It's that important - if you eat crap, you feel like crap, and usually look that way too. If you take ownership over your physical and mental health by controlling the foods you eat, and the loving aware atmosphere in which you eat them, you will probably slow your life down to focus on what's in front of you and your sensory experience of your time here on earth. It really is that important.

Ginger Tea

boiling sliced ginger

Drinking ginger tea. We're all sick - colds - so ginger tea's the drink du soir.

Boil an amount of ginger until it's gingery enough for your taste. Serve.

For the kids I often serve ginger tea over ice - makes it cold enough so they can drink it and watered down enough that they can take the heat. Also makes cool cracking sounds which the kids like.

Another method of serving ginger tea is hot with honey. With lemon vodka is also nice. You can add pretty much anything savoury or sweet. Ginger tea is very good for you and can match any tastebud.

It costs less than pennies to make and keeps the digestive system active. What a great deal.