The pending conversion of the junk food vegetarian.

My little sister is in that blissful and stunning month of self revision that proceeds a freshman year at college. I have taken up the task of outfitting her kitchen. She is coming down for a week in August to learn to prepare food, and I have promised to send her home with a list of healthful cheap and simple ways to start eating the sorts fo foods that make you feel well.

My sister does not (yet) read books on food politics or traditional foods. She is of a generation that reads a lot in very small portions (facebook, wikipedia pages, text messages). In preparing food guidelines for her, I realized I had to design something that would work into the way she sees the world. I believe in food traditions, in learning things by watching them done for years, as I did in my godmother’s kitchen. My sister has given me a week, not a childhood,  to teach her everything she needs to know about food. And she probably won’t read more than three pages about food unless she has a test. She’s dabbled in veganism, but has for the most part been a processed-food vegetarian for a good portion of her life. And she asked for my help “changing everything.” My family has a history of serious digestive issues (potentially due to our over consumption of soy products) and my sister is looking for ways to find wellness in food.

And even though she asked for this, I have to work on her terms. And her terms are “something to hang on the inside of a cabinet” and solve all of her “food problems.”  Which means simple foods, that are diverse, quick, complete. Foods that take no time to learn how to make and have endless possibilities for alteration. Foods that you can make on a college budget and fit into a college kitchen cabinet.

It’s a tall order, and I’m posting what I have so far below. I’m interested in suggestions and reflections, if anyone has the time.

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How to Not Die While Being a Vegetarian in College (Cliff’s Notes)

It seems the best way to promote health through food is to eat well long enough for you to be able to discern what “health” feels like and how your body responds to foods. When you reach this point in life you will be able to pay attention to your body, and intuit its needs. Do not feel like rules will solve your problems, or that food is the only factor in health. But do give food the credit it deserves: good food stimulates good digestion, good absorption of nutrients, good overall health.

To start, try to incorporate these five guidelines into EVERY meal:

1. leafy green
2. some other vegetable (or fruit, on occasion)
3. complete protein (Beans AND grain, Seeds AND Beans, milk AND Grain, Eggs AND Grain)
4. Digestive (raw or cultured dairy food, vinegar, fermented soy + sea vegetable)
5. B12 source (raw dairy product, meat or eggs. 1 ounce of raw cheese with each meal will suffice-but don’t melt it)

EXAMPLES of Basic Combinations:

Morning:

1)      Oats and nuts w/ fruit and milk or kefir

2)      Smoothie (w/ veggies) and toast (or french toast or pancakes if you have time to kill)

3)      Omelette w/ veggies, cheese and toast

4)      Rice with cottage cheese, dulse flakes or arame, cooked veggies

Lunch/Dinner:

1)      Salad: (lettuce, nuts and seeds, sprouts, raw cheese or egg, + vegetable, vinegar or buttermilk honey mustard)

2)      Stir fry: (rice w/ braised greens and veggies on top, beans or lentils, curry or peanut sauce)

3)      Pasta: (cooked veggies, tomato sauce w grated raw cheese or butter garlic sauce)

4)      Dips: Pita or crackers AND raw veggies (carrots, celery, lettuce), hummus or egg salad

5)      Soup and Sandwich: (make tomato bisque w/ cultured milk and tomato sauce with a green or make light miso veggie soup (see below). Add onions and tomatoes to grilled cheese or hummus w/veg and sprouts)

REMEMBER: Many “good for you” foods are good only when properly prepared. Our family is prone to digestive issues so try to be rigorous about the following:

1)Soak anything that was once a seed (grains and nuts included) see quick soak solution below.

2)cook (with broth- which is hydrophilic) or ferment all leafy greens excepting lettuce

3)Eat whole foods. Avoid juices and refined foods. If you juice veggies and fruits, eat the pulp as a salad (with olive oil salt and pepper. so good) Buy single ingredient foods as much as is possible.  The one exception to this rule is the addition of cultures to  dairy products and fermented foods, which aid digestion, intestinal health, absorption of nutrients, etc.

4)When you do eat muli-ingredient foods, check ingredients carefully on all foods. Organic is not the only standard: Don’t eat any prepared food that you couldn’t make in your kitchen with whole food ingredients. (People can make cheese in their kitchen, but not hydrogenated oils or citric acid)..

SEED SOAK: cover Grains/Nuts/Seeds for 12-24 Hrs in 2 tbsp whey and filtered water before use. Do not let them soak longer than this because they will sprout. Call your sister if this happens and she can teach you about making sprouted breads or other sprouted foods.

WHEY/YOGURT CHEESE: Find a pastured (meet the farmer to know that you mean the same thing by “pastured”) whole milk yogurt that is runny and let it drain through a thin cloth over a mesh strainer into a bowl for 12-24 hours. Place a bowl on top to press additional whey out after 5-6 hours. If you let it sit out close to 24 hours the yogurt cheese will be more firm and you will have more whey, mix salt pepper and spices into the cheese and use it as a spread. Reserve whey for soaking seeds and grains.

QUICK HUMMUS: combine and mix these ingredients in blender: 1 can chickpeas drained/ heaping tbsp tahini/tbsp whey/tbsp raw AC vinegar. Add cayenne pepper, garlic and salt to taste.

QUICK MISO SOUP: start with bone broth. Add pre-soaked seaweed or seasalt/seaweed mixture and garlic as base heats. Add pre-steamed vegetables and cooked grains (great use of leftovers!). Remove from heat after 6-8 minutes. Stir in miso just before serving- do not cook it.

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Shopping List to Not Die While Being a Vegetarian in College

25 Items to “Stock the Larder”

1)Coconut Oil

2)Celtic Sea Salt and Fresh Pepper

3)seaweed varieties

4)organic garlic powder

5)organic cayenne powder

6)organic curry powder

7)organic cinnamon

8)miso

9)Raw Apple Cider Vinegar

10)Aluminum free baking powder & Soda

11)Seeds to sprout

12)mustard

13)Organic whole wheat flour (put in freezer)

14)Organic bulk fair trade brown rice

15)Organic quinoa

16)Organic sprouted whole wheat pasta (no additives) or brown rice pasta

17)Organic oats

18)Organic onions

19)organic garlic

20)Organic spaghetti sauces

21)lentils

22)canned beans (garbanzo for hummus, black beans, aduki)

23)nuts and seeds

24)peanut butter and sesame butter (tahini)

25) raw honey

Each week buy pantry items you are out of and these ten things:

1) 4 varieties of leafy greens (variety!)

2) 4 other vegetables (no more than 2 starchy root vegetables)

3) 2-3 fruit varieties

4) Organic raw milk cheeses (this might be your only available raw milk food if you can’t find a farmer, so stock up)

5) organic local free ranging eggs

6) Organic whole milk grass fed yogurt (no sugar added, really milky to drain whey)

7) Organic pasture butter

8) Organic grass fed whole milk cottage cheese w/ lactic cultures

9) Organic whole milk buttermilk OR plain kefir OR non-homogenized whole milk that you add buttermilk starter to from last week’s buttermilk

10)Sprouted grain (WHOLE WHEAT, NO ADDITIVES THAT YOU COULDN’T MAKE IN YOUR KITCHEN): either bread (w/ seed meal) or pita or tortillas or crackers

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A Word on . . .

Meat:

meats, if you decide to include them are better in small portions. Think of them as an ingredient among many rather than a main course. 1/3 of a chicken breast is sufficient for a meal in combination with vegetable proteins (grains or legumes). Save the rest for other meals (add slices to salads, make up chicken salad and eat small amounts with your meals, or dice it and add it to a stir fry or soup). Buy high quality pastured local bird meats. Get heritage birds if possible. Or wait till Christmas and ask your sister to bring you a bunch of frozen birds from a farm that she knows well. Wild caught salmon is better for you than tuna, and not currently endangered. Do not eat farmed fish. Animal broths are great sources of nutrients if you make them yourself, don’t use bullion, and if you buy chicken broth make sure it is organic and doesn’t have additives.

Soy:

only use fermented organic products. We don’t know the effects of Genetically Modified foods, but there have been horrific animal studies that show that they contribute to serious health issues, infertility and death.

Corn:

Buy organic and whole kernel. Do not eat corn-based additives. eat with lime.

Yeast:

Autolyzed yeast extract is the base of MSG. IF you eat nutritional yeast make sure it is low-heat processed so that it isn’t accidentally chalked full of MSG (which is made with a similar process, but at high heat). Candida runs in your family, so make sure that you eat yeast products AND SUGARS only irregularly. Mom and I get “MSG” headaches, so be aware of products that might have MSG yeasts in them that aren’t labeled as such. This happens pretty regularly, as MSG is an accidental by-product in many foods. See suggestions on processed foods below to help avoid this.

Processed Foods:

I know I’ve already said this, but it bears repeating: Check ingredients carefully. Eat whole foods. Organic is not the only standard: Don’t eat anything that you couldn’t make in your kitchen. (People can make cheese in their kitchen, but not hydrogenated oils or citric acid).

Eating out:

Don’t do this often, but when you do, chose a small restaurant that has rice as its starch base (Thai, Indian, Chinese, Sushi bars). Talk to the cook- They are often able to accommodate menu alterations that would reduce additives (cornstarch, soy sauce etc) especially with stir fries. Opt for white rice as they won’t have pre-soaked their grains- it is not as nutrient dense, but many of the anti-nutrients(that soaking would break down) are in the hull and bran.

Ask them to cook food in butter or steam it– tell them that you can’t have soy or corn oils. Don’t eat any animal that could be industry farmed (which usually means eat vegetarian). Unless they advertise all organic produce, don’t eat potatoes or onions, which have growth inhibitors on them that are really damaging. Don’t assume that the restaurants do these things anyway because they are “some cool vegan restaurant” or advertise making everything from scratch. Make sure you let them know you have food sensitivities, so that they don’t just think you are a bitch. Small organic-hipster restaurants are an occasional possibility but find out what is in the food- best bets for eating out at hipster restaurants are typically soup and salad.

May Review

here it is, again: a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings.  I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights.

life with a little one (abridged, and in pictures):

Andi is in to everything. We try to incorporate her in to our chores (and the bottom of the clean laundry basket) as best we can. We are needing to be more and more creative to allow for learning opportunities while managing her safety and the state of our home.                            ————————————-

She is on the move. Her crawl is perfected, and she’s cruising on her feet when she gets near enough to a wall or steady object. She loves her father’s toy piano, which was the first thing on which she pulled herself to standing.  -

Her sweet german swing, while more brightly colored than out typical household adornments has been a precious gift of time. we have attached hooks in the new addition and in the entry to the kitchen, so I can have a few minutes at a hot stove or a computer.  ————————————-

outside:

i) potatoes are growing fast, and we’re doing our best to keep them well hilled so we’ll get a good crop.

ii) The pear and apple suffered from blight, but we’ve pruned, garlic-ed and sulfured them, and they are recovering. the other fruit trees are doing well and are all producing- save the almond, which just went in this year.

iii) While the birds got to our cherries and grapes before we did, they haven’t been fast enough on the strawberries (or perhaps we planted enough to share). Strawberries have become Andjoli’s favorite food, and perhaps mine as well. They are interspersed through our front and back gardens and our orchard area, and the certain find of a ripe berry makes garden tasks in all of these areas more enjoyable.

inside:

i) the summer work has been more overwhelming than I anticipated. I have a lot more on my academic plate than I originally realized, and the fact that I had planned to rest and am substituting that rest out for more work makes it all more daunting.

ii) We have moved into the addition- as it is the coolest place in the house. We have spread mattresses to lounge on in the living-area. It is not the most put together, but is a soft landing for an experimenting child and it makes family bed bigger- so we can spread out in hot weather. It also affords a beautiful view of the back gardens. The true bedroom is stifling hot, as we are (intentionally) living without AC this summer to save natural resources.

iii) for a long time we have been focusing on eating local organic foods, with the regular addition of dry bulk items. The changing season is making this more palatable, and we have been forced out of our winter standards now that we have an abundance of fresh greens. Some of our favorites this month were homemade falafel on homemade crepes stuffed with all the spring garden green. Also: savory oatmeal. yes, you heard me. we’ve added spring onions and green garlic and a bit of local cheese to our oatmeal and it is wonderful.

iv) we are trying to do all of our indoor cooking in the evening time, so the house has a whole night to cool off after the stove heats it up. We have created a miniature outdoor kitchen for the day that houses our toaster oven, rotisserie and crock pot. B is excited to build a more attractive and efficient outdoor kitchen for the summer, complete with clay oven, and an induction burner, and perhaps a solar cooker or thermal cookers. For this year, we will probably add the induction burner and build a solar cooker, and look at the more complicated (clay oven) and expensive (thermal cooker) projects for the future. I am excited that my husband is excited about cooking- even if it is the energy saving/green technology/building kitchen side of things.

A side note: it is funny that even when I try to write about indoor things, it somehow bleeds in to writing about outdoor things. This is rather reflexive of the way we live life. and I like it.

v) In order to ameliorate this tendency to focus on the outdoors as much as we do we are making plans to bring some of it inside, in the form of houseplants. We have some overwintering edibles that stayed at a friends house for the colder months that might return to our home: a banana, lemon and pomegranate. I planted some ginger (and await more plants from my mother) and we hope to add vanilla, cinnamon, figs, limes, indian coleus,  and bay to our indoor plant collection this year, so we will have a good deal of green things to keep in our home when the world turns brown outside.

creation:

i) I submitted a short story to a writing contest. this is only the second time I have ever done this. I do not know when results will be published, and don’t want inquiries. just forget I said anything.

community, work, politics, and the rest of the world:

i) all of these things keep happening. I’m just too tired to recall much of it.

To the End of Dark Days.

Spring is really here, and in celebration of the new season, we have set out the tomatoes and pepper starts and emptied the winter freezer.

Our lettuce, planted slightly up grade from the water barrels (to get maximum shade), has been left to its own. It has been fighting to get the water it needs-depending on the spring rains- as the drip hoses running from the barrels have not figured out how to defy gravity. A higher barrel stand is in the plans, but did not make it to the top of our list in time, and the sunniest lettuce spots have started to bolt. In order to ensure this weeks salads were not too bitter, I picked the rest of it. bags. And so, along side all my use-up-the-freezer-content concoctions, we have an abundance of spring greens. 

We will look forward to lettuces from the market for a few more weeks- from growers who have more shade and a better water supply than us- and then we will wait on lettuce until the fall when we put in our second round of the cool weather crop. Don’t pity us for this waiting. I must tell you: it is a luxury to eat in season. It tastes better, partially because it is fresh and local- rather than being the result of under-ripe shipments or bland breedings that ensure long shelf life over quality. But seasonal foods also taste better precisely because you need to wait for them. Spring lettuce is a joy, as we have waited the winter for it. And fall lettuce, too, will be a joy, because we will have gone the hottest part of the growing season without it. the waiting makes the  food taste better. 

That is not to say that  we wait on everything. We do a good deal of putting up. And this season, as I have noted, is the season to clean out our food storage in preparation for a summer and fall of refilling. There is not much left after a long winter: some red pepper and broccoli, a little stock. potatoes, basil, and spinach. Some berries that we would have eaten, had they not been misplaced under the greens (they are quickly being used up in morning smoothies). Black beans, wheat berries and flax seed, that will keep a little longer in the freezer and be used in the next few weeks.  And lentil soup. 

I have been making up pizza crusts, biscuits and pancakes with my sourdough starter and I decided to try my hand at a sourdough pasty crust to stuff with our frozen edibles. for those who know me, you will know that “trying my hand” at anything bake-able is rather hit or miss because I very rarely consult  a recipe. This strategy works stovetop, but not always with leavenings. The sourdough has been a joy, however- because so far, I have not been able to go truly wrong. and the pasties, i must say, were truly right. 

I made up three varieties, to eat our fill of, share with neighbors, and freeze for quick dinners when I don’t have time to cook. The fillings perfectly used up the end of our freezer food, plus a few around the house ingredients (wine from the last in-law visit, a few nuts) and fresh garlic greens, mushrooms, spinach, eggs, flour, butter and cheese from the farmer’s market.  

These were my batches:

-Spinach with feta- I used the secret recipe for the stuffing to my godmother’s spanikopita. Do not tell her I substituted out the phylo. She might get upset. 

-white wine braised shiitakes with basil, potato, walnut and colby.

-broccoli and cheddar with fresh green garlic.

I do not typically gloat over my own food, but I have never made a more perfect crust than this. I used the start to my pizza crust recipe- equal parts sourdough starter and flour but instead of oil, I shaved in a whole lot of butter.  As the starter has matured it has developed an impressive flavor, that has begun to be a staple in the food from my kitchen. I like having staples. and empty freezers, ready for refilling. 

to spring. and the end of dark days.

the way things change when you sleep at night

There is one old tree left at the end of the driveway. Not one stretch of space on our plot of land is otherwise the same as it was four years ago. I feel myself slipping, sometimes, dizzy with how fast this bit of time is passing and place is changing.

Four years. We were impulsive, but not unmindful of the weight of our decisions. We opted to skip a wedding with all its extravagance and expense and we settled instead on a court-house marriage and a mortgage. We found the perfect house- 600 square feet of roofed-over space on a large-enough wooded lot that also had an adequately sunned quarter acre for a garden. It was on a dead end, and saw no traffic. The small wild field next door attracted summer fireflies that twinkled over it in our earliest nights here, and it felt like the something new of childhood all over again, but lacking the cliché that this sentence conveys. I suppose that’s about as close as I can get to saying much about early love.

There were more trees, beyond the field. This was a city space, but one that I could always qualify with the idea that there were “more trees.” It was a mile from the university where I taught and worked on my PhD- we could walk to work, bike to the summer market. The house was in disrepair, which made it affordable- and allowed us a frame in which we could learn, plan, and actualize our first joint fixing-up of a space we would come to know as “ours”. We gutted it, and we’ve worked the four years to salvage and harvest and collect the materials needed to smother this little house with our color schemes and organizational bents. We dug beds into the clay soil in that well-sunned patch. We did our share of making things “ours”, but we anticipated some things- the things we bought the land for- to stay as they were.

I had never lived in the city before this. And I, quite ignorantly, did not recognize immediately that the place did not share the same logic as the woods I grew up in. In the city, trees are not respected, and they are not yours. Fields are not left alone. They are sold off. Roads are extended. As neighborhoods “improve” the majority of the “more trees” are replaced with tall wooden fences.

A house, twice as tall as ours looms now where the fireflies used to light. By the logic of this place it is “beautiful.” The bit of field land that could have been left, or at very least, allowed to remain green in their front yard was shot over with a thick layer of gravel. The stones pierced our old wood siding like shrapnel as they laid it out. They buried our fruit bushes, and now, even as a new fence has been erected between the gravel and our plot of earth- the stones seep under. The neighbors are kind, but they believe in big houses and gravel, and I have difficulty reconciling our difference, because I have always lived before this, in the privileged of the woods. I draw the curtains to the west, and I do what I can to remember the trees and the field. To forget the siding.

While construction for the big house was still underway the city, who owned the halves and quarters of the trees that sprawled across our property and city property on the east side of our house decided a new drainage system and a fence would better serve the borders between our land and theirs. And we didn’t have much say in the matter, as the “city” who owns “city land” dictates the rules and zoning. And trees, I learned, are unsafe to have in the city. It is a real concern here that, if left alone, they could fall over on someone’s house. I petitioned them to leave us a single old maple in the front yard- far from any structures. It stands alone now, with fences in most of the places where it used to find its brethren.

It is a city maple, unlike the trees you see in the forest. There is an old metal post at the northern side of the trunk, that the tree has folded its bark around. Its limbs are awkwardly unbalanced, as a primary branch was loped off early to prevent the tree from getting in the way of the power lines. But it is the last old thing on this plot, and I fought to keep it because I had this sense that we needed a relic. a bit of something that binds us to the past, and shows us that the world can grow old, and does not always need early replacement. Something to remind us, that there was a before, and that we probably could have left well enough alone. We do not, of course, listen well to this old unsymmetrical prophet: everything else has been removed or strategically covered over. And it is not, of course, all the fault of the city and the new neighbors. We have made it “ours,” remember? We have repainted the wood siding and replaced the windows. We changed the front door. We covered every internal surface with wood, tile, paint, cabinets, fixtures. I dug out the slew of pink flowers that covered the front yard and gave them away to neighbors, because I find the color repulsive. I covered the grass with mulch, and set up an irrigation system that directs the water down from our new metal roof.

And we planted. First, to settle in and make the claim that we were staying put– but then, we planted to make up for all of the loss. I planted berry bushes and native wildflowers. We put in trees. We ceremoniously twisted together a pair of young ash to celebrate our marriage. We scattered young heirloom fruit trees through the back plot. They may set fruit this year. but it will be a long time before they rival the old maple.

But rival, or no rival, our time is passing in plants. We impatiently await the harvest of the asparagus, put in four years ago. This will be the first year that we will be able to cut shoots. A peach tree went in this August, planted over the placenta from our first child. She was born here, in our home, in a summer of cicadas. I labored in a water trough in our yard amid all the late season growth — and for all my bitterness about the changing landscape, I must also at least mention, that the land we have left is beautiful. And while trees typically fall more gradually than is true in our city, without the shade cast from the high branches, the ground bears anew. And we have changed the cycle, yes, but we have not aborted the fecundity of the land. It is re-seeding and sending up shoots. This starting over, while it appears new, is actually very old. The land, the earth under all of our covers, also, is our relic.

And all I can do about it, really, is try to catch it and pen it down. Here it is, I suppose, connecting, and passing. And I try to keep up by translating it into a recombination of old words. These too, I suppose are our relics, made new, re-seeding. When I was younger I found some sanity in trying to make sense of time passing, and it’s high time that I learn something from my youth. And it was youth that gave me the time and motivation to keep record–I would document the raging emotions that came with being young and aware that I could touch the world, and that it, too, was touching me. The page was my creative and constant forum- and I rambled across it, blind and self confident and messy as hell. and here i am again.

hello.

it has been too long since I’ve written anything. and of course, I am aware that I am falling back to the lofty and useless poetics that separate me from authentic life while I’m trying so hard to just get at it. I’m not choosing the right words, and I lack a deep sense of what needs to be said. I’m more self-conscious than I used to be, and I do not trust words like I used to. But I have this sense, perhaps, that if I keep at it, I’ll get there. And the belief that there is a trajectory is what I need right now. And so I’m writing to find it. I’m seeking out relics for meaning. I’m slowing the dizzy down. Which is the best I can do right now.

hello.