Manna bread
Since I got a seed sprouting bag a few days ago, I thought I’d sprout some wheat, and got to tinkering in the kitchen. I just made manna bread for the first time: it’s kinda… interesting. It definitely tastes healthy. It’s essentially 2-3 ingredients: sprouted wheat berries and raisins (a pinch of salt is optional), crushed into a floury paste in the food processor. I threw in a couple pinches of sesame seeds and about a tablespoon of chopped walnuts (to a cup of sprouted wheat, and about 1/8 cup raisins), and put it in the oven on the lowest setting for several hours. I was tempted to use the dehydrator, but I think the thickness of the loaf would have prevented it drying out enough.
The theory is that sprouted wheat flour is more nutritious than the traditional, and this loaf is more like a kavli or wasa type of bread: in other words, it’s not “bready” (yeasty, fluffy, etc). It reminds me a lot of the wholegrain, oily flatbreads eaten in Germany, in a good way.
And it makes a change from the everyday homemade load of bread. It’s worth googling if you are into raw vegan: you can adapt the recipe to keep the loaf under 120 degrees F, to preserve the enzymes.
beeeeets!
Raw beet & red cabbage salad
Funny how in the midst of winter, some summer colors can still show up to feed the eye.
Half the joy of this slaw/salad is in the magenta color & the knowledge that those colors are phytonutrients. The other half is the surprisingly pleasant taste. I like pickled beets ok, I’ll eat cooked beets if I must, but raw beets? Never would have thought of it, if Mark BIttman’s fantastic cookbook,How to Cook Everything hadn’t had a recipe. It’s pretty tasty: I fiddled with the amounts of vinegar (I used balsamic instead of sherry vinegar, too), and used pretty common grainy mustard, instead of Dijon. Squeezed a couple of clementines into it, for good measure, and it’s pretty damn good. Definitely my favorite way to eat beets.
Dilemma 1
About a year ago, I crashed & burned after a very poor implementation of a raw vegan lifestyle. It was the usual failures: too much reliance on nuts & avocados, and not the giant amount of greens that’s needed to bolster the system through such a radical change. And although I lost 20 pounds pretty quickly, I felt absolutely horrible.
The thing is, I feel pretty strongly that eating the right way is the best way to have individual control over health care costs (from a personal level, of course…cumulatively, that can only come if the whole country becomes more involved in ditching junk food, etc.). So, it’s incumbent on me to harness some sort of knowledge & apply it to some sort of diet…and right there is where it starts to get murky.
I’ve got some routines established, mostly in the area of making breakfast for myself, which I have never embraced before, mostly due to early-morning ennuie. And I like it, I really like having a complex meal in the morning. At this point, it consists of homemade refried beans, salsa, cooked egg whites, and soy cheese, rolled up in a whole-grain tortilla. And it’s great, I love it. But I’m pretty sure it’s still got elements of “cop-out” in it (especially the soy cheese). If a person takes a stand against processed food, it all becomes seriously inconvenient, when combined with a long commute & a long workday. And yet, it seems that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing 100%.
An article popped up on Yahoo yesterday about the nutrients lost when microwaving vegetables, which threw another spanner in the works. The microwave is currently pretty essential to my daily routines: we certainly don’t have a stove at work. I’m seriously considering getting a VitaMix, and just making everything into a smoothie, and being done with it, except that would get old pretty fast. I love juicing, and will drink stuff that makes most people run away, like kale-collards-carrot juice that’s a hideous green-brown color. It’s just a lot of work to prep all the ingredients & take the juicer apart & wash every piece: it comes down to about 30 minutes of work for a glass of juice. (It seems ridiculous that I’m complaining about this, seeing it in writing. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’s more like 45 minutes. Damn it! Prepare for a follow-up post, complete with time trials.)
My Dad’s Pet Fig Trees
real food challenge
my awesome cousin