Rhubarb!

I had a new dilemma to solve when some rhubarb arrived in my Food Connect box as I haven’t had any contact with rhubarb apart from possibly eating some in a restaurant dessert.

But first I wanted to know what I could call it – a fruit or a vegetable - and it appears that I’m not alone in my confusion. Wikipedia tells me that rhubarb is normally considered to be a vegetable, except in the United States which counts it as a fruit for regulation and duties purposes.

Next I wondered if it could be eaten raw and an online search brought up the perfect solution. I varied the recipe a little to suit the Thermomix.

Recipe ingredients:
275g rhubarb
100g honey
50g sultanas

Instructions:
Mix all ingredients in the Thermomix on speed 5 for a few seconds.

The tart flavour came through in my taste test just after making it. However the taste mellowed as I sampled the mix and after two days it was delicious. I’ll certainly repeat this performance next time some rhubarb arrives in my home.

Tomato Glut; More Pesto; Baked Beans

Finally a tomato glut! It’s been a rare sight last year and this but it’s nice to know it can still happen. While I also get tomatoes in my Food Connect box, the tomatoes in this bowl have all grown on my upstairs patio.

I’ve also had the biggest bunch of tomatoes in the five years I’ve been growing them. Including the two I had already harvested this bunch had eleven tomatoes on it. I’ve found the Father Tom tomatoes from Floriana have been particularly productive and this bunch just goes to prove it.

Tonight I’ve had the pleasure of working out how I’m going to use them. Homemade baked beans sprang to mind and I also decided to include some tomatoes in the kale pesto I had been planning to make tonight. The remaining tomatoes will go well on my lunch time salad so I’m sure this glut won’t become a burden.

So I decided on a triple whammy! I made the kale and tomato pesto followed by cooking homemade baked beans and then finished off by making my dinner for tonight – all in the Thermomix and only washing it after my dinner had come out. Now that’s what I call efficiency!

I made the pesto the same way as last night except that I added 120g tomatoes to the mix. Adding the tomato gave a new dimension to the overall taste that was quite okay so I’ll probably continue adding tomatoes to pesto in the future. As much of the pesto as possible was placed into the ice cube tray leaving a small quantity in the Thermomix bowl to supplement the next item on the list.

Navy beans were on my shopping list today but since they weren’t available I picked up some black-eyed beans instead. I prefer navy beans as once I’ve cooked them up into baked beans they look just like the canned variety available in the supermarket but with a superior taste of course.

This afternoon I had covered the black-eyed beans with water in a saucepan and boiled the beans for 5 minutes. Then once the heat had receded I boiled and then topped up the water in the saucepan and covered it. An hour or two later I tested the beans and found they had finished cooking and were perfect. 

The absorption method really works for me when cooking quinoa and these black-eyed beans. However with both brown rice and chick peas I have found that after the absorption time I need to refresh the water and cook them a little longer to achieve a good result.

I followed a modified version of the Molasses Baked Beans recipe in the cookbook “America’s Best Slow Cooker Recipes”, which included blending the tomatoes in the Thermomix instead of using tomato paste or sauce . Then I noticed the downside of keeping the remaining pesto in the bowl as the normally red mix had turned brown. 

Recipe ingredients:
350g tomatoes chopped
Small onion chopped
4 tbsp sugar
1 tsp dry mustard
half tsp salt
1 tbsp molasses
sprinkle of black pepper
cooked black-eyed beans

Instructions:
Process the tomatoes in the Thermomix for 10 seconds on speed 9.
Add onion, sugar, mustard, salt, molasses, pepper and the cooked black-eyed beans.
Process for 15 minutes at 100 degrees C on reverse speed soft.
 
The pesto’d baked beans tasted very nice. After placing most of the mix into pyrex dishes I then added the ingredients for my stir-fry dinner into the Thermomix which along with a fried egg finished off my marathon cooking effort. Now there’s just a few more dishes for me to deal with and then I’m well and truly done for the night.

Kale Pesto

I scored a huge bunch of kale in my Food Connect box today. Rather than risk not getting to it quickly enough and thus wasting it, I made some kale pesto from a recipe on the internet which I basically followed.

Recipe ingredients:
Clove of garlic chopped
2 cups of kale
½ cup of macadamia nuts
½ teaspoon of Himalayan Salt
2 tablespoons of olive oil

Instructions:
Process all ingredients in the Thermomix on speed 6 for 10 seconds. 

Half of this mix will supplement my lunch over the next couple of days while I have placed the other half into the freezer.

With half of the kale still waiting to be used, I will buy some pine nuts tomorrow and then make some more pesto. This time I will freeze the pesto in an ice cube tray as I have done in the past with lemon juice. Then I can pull one or two pesto cubes out at a time which will make things much easier.

If I am really on the ball tomorrow night, I’ll remember to make the pesto first and then make my dinner in the Thermomix so that my dinner will get some pesto flavour. I love getting multiple meals out of my Thermomix. It makes washing it afterwards so much more worthwhile!

Pineapple Salad

Yummm. It might seem like an unusual dinner but I had some pineapple, carrot and sweet potato that I wanted to use up before picking up my Food Connect box tomorrow.
Pineapples are very juicy. I had enjoyed half of the pineapple chopped up with my lunch and as a mid-afternoon snack. The remainder formed the basis of a chunky souped up salad comprising just three ingredients.

Recipe ingredients:
320g pineapple
210g carrot
120g sweet potato

Instructions:
Process the ingredients together in the Thermomix on speed 6 for 6 seconds.

Naturally there was some chewing involved but the sweetness and liquid nature of the pineapple made it very easy to eat. I added some chick peas just to make sure I was getting enough calories.
After having eaten almost a whole pineapple over two consecutive meals I couldn't finish off the last of the mix as the amount of pineapple I had eaten was affecting my tongue and gums. So the remainder will make it on to my lunch plate tomorrow.
Trying this combination has reminded me that I can mix just about anything together into a soup or salad. This combination would make a great side salad option in a buffet.

Sleeping Patterns; Food Enzymes

As I was still emptying my fridge of 80/10/10 non-compliant foods, I decided to conduct an experiment. With a tin of sustainably fished tuna and another of similarly fished salmon, I wanted to know if eating this fish might affect my sleep.

I decided to conduct this experiment after I had enjoyed the best sleep that I’ve had for I can’t remember how long – from 10.30pm to 6.30am where I stirred briefly but went straight back to sleep – which just happened to be the night following my last post.

The next day I ate similar food to what I had posted including some quinoa for breakfast and a cappuccino, except that my night-time salad comprised lettuce and tomatoes from my Food Connect box along with the tin of tuna. I had a fitful night’s sleep waking just after midnight and again at regular intervals after that.

The following day I ate similar food including the quinoa for breakfast and the cappuccino, but this time my night-time salad included some extra ingredients from my patio including basil, mint and parsley along with the tin of salmon. And I had a similar night’s sleep waking just after midnight and a few times afterwards.

To be fair, in the past I always enjoyed a half or a third of such tins on a meal, so perhaps what I ate each dinner was really too much for my system. But what I ate was no more than what I would have eaten if I had gone out for dinner.

Anyway, the following day I ate again in a similar way but with no fish at dinner time. My sleeping pattern that night was from 10.30pm to 4.30am and then 5.30am to 6.30am, and since then I have enjoyed a couple of nights sleep going through to 6.30am – but only after days with no animal protein. So I’m reaching the position that eating fish at night-time might affect my sleep that night. But I still need to check how eating fish earlier in the day might affect me. 

The timing of meals and eating has become another item to investigate. I have read on the internet that it’s best to finish eating by 7pm at night, but there are some people who finish by 2pm in the afternoon. As I trawl the web right now, I’m reading that 5pm is a good time too. 

I rather like the idea of finishing eating earlier in the day. I understand the concept of food needing time to move through the stomach and also that we need to finish eating at least a few hours before bedtime. So I’m working towards making my last meal for the day as early as possible and in the meantime ensure that it is earlier than 7pm.

This afternoon I’ll be collecting two boxes from Food Connect – a Family Fruit box along with a Mini Mixed box. My first order from Food Connect was the Mini Mixed box which was enough for me at the time. Since I’m now predominantly on the 80/10/10 program with its fruit focus, I believe I can handle both boxes but will use up some of the vegetables in the mixed box by making soup for my Mum. However I do wonder whether eating all this fruit is sustainable. If we all decided we wanted to eat this way then I’m sure the farmers wouldn’t be able to cope, or perhaps over time their focus would move away from other crops onto fruit. So I am mulling about how I’ll proceed into the future.

Just to make things more complicated, I’ve become fascinated with Food Enzymes. As I keep trawling the internet and the local library for information on raw food, the word “enzymes” keeps appearing, and finally I’ve found a fascinating book that can explain it all to me.

"Food enzymes for health and longevity" by Edward Howell, published in 1994 and based on a book by the same author first published in 1946, is recognised as a classic and provides ample evidence of how important the enzymes are that we are either endowed with at birth or that we assimilate when we eat raw food or take enzyme tablets.

The part that I’ve appreciated reading the most is that eating raw food is very helpful to us because after we’ve eaten some raw food the enzymes are still intact in the food and help to predigest it, thus leaving our body’s enzymes free to do other important work. However cooking food at a significant temperature destroys the food’s enzymes.

I’ve been reading the book while helping to see my Mum through withdrawal symptoms from the heavy duty drugs that she has been on for shingles. Note to self: in the future, if I am experiencing significant pain and believe I can handle the pain, don’t take heavy duty drugs as withdrawal from them can be challenging. 

My Mum went through a fasting phase because she didn’t feel like eating anything, and then she started feeling so nauseous that she needed to go into hospital. It just so happens that a section in the Food Enzymes book explains what she might have been going through. 

It seems that most people who fast go through what could be called a healing crisis where they feel nausea and vomiting. Because we eat so much cooked food, the enzymes in our bodies spend most of their time helping to digest the food we eat. When we fast, the body’s enzymes can now work on healing our body by repairing and removing diseased tissues through the various elimination means.

The book appears to me to be more oriented to medical practitioners as it discusses research conducted in the same or similar fields. However, there are sections at the beginning and end including two interview dialogues along with a summary of the salient points that helps to explain the reasoning in the book. So I’m very pleased that I borrowed the book from the library.

However it didn’t give me the definitive guide for a healthy way of eating that I’m looking for, despite being very happy on the 80/10/10 diet program, as the main recommendation for people on cooked food seems to be taking enzyme capsules. So I’ll continue trolling the web to see what other ideas might come up about what appears to be a very important topic. 

From week to week, I never quite know what little snippets of information might catch my attention and influence what and how I eat. I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt, with good health as the prize.

Mixed Messages

Clearly, I don’t know where I’m at right now. One minute I love the 80/10/10 diet and the next I’m ready to step away from it. And if I’m confused then I can only imagine what anyone reading the past few posts might be thinking…

But moving on to being predominantly 80/10/10 is such a big move that I’m happy to forgive myself for feeling a bit uncertain about staying on it. However, the hands that drive me to the organic food stores and reach inside my bag for my purse don’t seem to have the same problem. Perhaps it’s the lovely fresh feel of ripe fruit or maybe my stomach is dictating what it would prefer! I’m not sure but I do sense that regardless of my worm farm still being swamped by what I provided two weeks ago and the rapidity with which my freezer fills up with fruit scraps, some part in me seems to be perfectly happy to continue, and so I’m going with the flow.

I do notice the difference between where I am at right now and where I was at just a few weeks ago. Over Easter, I cleaned out 5 tomato tubs and the accompanying connections when one month ago I could only handle cleaning out 2 tubs. Admittedly towards the end of my 3-hour marathon, I was starting to falter. However, that still doesn’t take away from what felt like a significant increase in energy.

I’ve stopped logging everything I eat in Nutridiary. Instead, I aim to eat 400 calories of fruit at each meal, which this morning was handled by eating 5 prunes and then a rock melon followed by 3 small apples accompanying some quinoa. Later in the morning, I enjoyed a soy cappuccino.

For lunch, I had some persimmons followed by a mandarin, while I started my dinner early by enjoying 7 mandarins mid-afternoon followed by a large plate of lettuce, celery, tomatoes, parsley, mint and lime juice a while later.

Even though I’m not logging my intake every day, I’ve just decided to check how I’ve gone today. Even with the inclusion of the cooked quinoa and the soy cappuccino, I am well within the 80/10/10 diet guidelines but have eaten 81% raw foods today. So I’m nowhere near being able to use the tag of 80/10/10 rv which means that I’m complying with the 80/10/10 guidelines and also am eating raw vegan food. But at least I have something to aim for!

I think I’m doing too good a job in getting enough calories as today’s intake has far exceeded the amount I believe I need to maintain my weight. Fortunately, if I exclude the soy cappuccino and cooked quinoa then I’m just under my daily quota. I’m not worried about being over the quota today as twice in the past week I’ve been under the quota, so today is a good opportunity to make up the difference. But what I’m pleased to see from checking out today’s consumption is that when I move off the cooked grains and cappuccinos I’ll know how much I need to eat to meet my caloric requirements.

For the moment I’m still holding onto the grains. I used to love cooked rice with milk and honey as I was growing up and this transformed into my preferred breakfast of cooked brown rice with a piece of fruit. It’s such a pity that brown rice is a grain and therefore frowned upon within the 80/10/10 diet. Otherwise, it would be a perfect food for me to eat as it fits the 80/10/10 guidelines.

Unfortunately, I keep reading that grains are not good for me as they are not easy to digest. I still have some brown and basmati rice in my fridge along with the quinoa that I recently cooked and once I finish these off, I don’t plan on buying any more.

I’m starting to settle into a pattern with how I’m sourcing my fruit and salad items. This week for the first time I have bought a family size box of fruit from Food Connect, which amuses me as anyone looking at me would wonder where I would fit it all. But fruit is such an easy food to devour that I know there won’t be a problem at all. In fact, in addition to the family size fruit box, I have also bought additional kilos of persimmons and mandarins, along with an extra rock melon and some figs. For my night-time salad, I have taken on a kilo of tomatoes and two lettuces. I picked up the family sized box of fruit with the extras on Tuesday and by my reckoning, I’ll be buying more fruit by Saturday if not before.

The best part is now that we’re past the summer months I have moved back into growing veggies on my patio. In the past couple of weekends, I have planted out 5 new tomato plants along with a tray of snow peas and 2 trays of both lettuce and celery seedlings to complement the 2 trays of herbs that I’ve managed to keep alive over the summer. One of the herb trays has mint in it so I have an excellent example of how mint spreads out to fill the available space. In sympathy for the basil that is in the same tray as the mint and fighting to keep its space, I have planted some extra basil seedlings in the parsley tray. I’ve set myself a goal of controlling the mint’s growth, but I’m not sure who’s going to win.

So it looks like I’m set to continue on my predominantly fruit journey. I do feel a bit sad that I’m not using my Thermomix quite as much as I was, but it proves to be very helpful when friends or family visit or when I need to provide a few meals to my Mum as she recovers from shingles. I have also noticed that Douglas Graham has included recipes in his 80/10/10 Diet book that would suit being made in the Thermomix that I must try in the near future.

It feels strange to be on predominantly fruit. When I’m dining out it’s hard to find a meal that is acceptable under 80/10/10, so I have decided on two options. If I’m out for breakfast or brunch then I’ll have scrambled eggs on toast. I know, I know, totally against the 80/10/10 guidelines but an easy way to handle things and also an opportunity for a little break. For lunch or dinner I would have some fish on a green salad which is also against the guidelines but again I don’t mind having a break occasionally.

I judge how my journey with raw food or more specifically 80/10/10 is going by how well I sleep. When I’m being “good” – and I’d consider the fruit, salad and extras I’ve had today as being “good” - I pretty much sleep right through for 7 hours or more. When I’m not, I’ll wake up in the early hours of the morning and find it difficult to get back to sleep. I’m enjoying this journey because I feel like what I’m doing is starting to make a real difference to how I wake up in the morning and how much energy I have during the day. I think this lifestyle is a keeper!

The 80/10/10 Diet

I’ve almost finished reading the book “The 80/10/10 Diet” by Douglas Graham and have trialed the diet today by eating according to the 80% carbohydrate, 10% fat and 10% protein rule.

I like this way of eating. I’ve had a sweet tooth since I was a young child and I’m finding that I have no noticeable sweet cravings when I eat a significant amount of fruit. Who would have thought it would be so easy to fix that problem!

If there’s any downside it is the huge volume of food that needs to be eaten from fruit and vegetable groups in order to fulfill the 80% carbohydrate requirement. Fortunately, it makes it easier that foods that we call vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers are actually fruits so they and others like zucchini and squash can be eaten as often as preferred. Greens are also very important for their mineral content and I need to ensure that I have a significant amount of greens each day.

So here is what I’ve had today:-

Breakfast

5 prunes

300g pears with 105g bananas

Morning tea

Rice Milk Cappuccino

Lunch

190g pineapple, 75g tomato, 320g pears

Snack

100g bananas

Dinner

170g pineapple and 180g grapes

135g pineapple, 180g cos lettuce, 150g tomatoes and 150g capsicum

This amounts to over 2kg of food which is a phenomenal amount for me, however, I must remember that this volume is replacing the bread, cooked grains, beans and chick peas that I have been eating.

I have tallied all of this on the Nutridiary web site which tells me that that the foods that I have eaten today fall within the 80/10/10 guidelines, even including the rice milk cappuccino. However, drinking the cappuccino has meant that what I have eaten today hasn’t been entirely raw.

I do wonder how I’ll go eating this way into the longer term. This week I ordered a fruit box from Food Connect rather than a combined vegetable and fruit box, and I placed additional orders for some lettuce and tomatoes. Next week I’ll do the same again and also request some celery and cucumber. But what I receive from Food Connect won’t keep me going the whole week so either I’ll need to buy extras from organic food stores or else increase the size of the fruit box. There will be heaps more food scraps going into my worm farm and I’m wondering whether it will get swamped.

But overall I feel pretty good after a day of following the 80/10/10 diet. And being 91% raw – it’s a pity about the cappuccino! It will be interesting to see if I lose interest in this daily habit of cappuccinos as I continue playing with eating this way.

I’m having lunch with friends tomorrow and will aim to have a salad but won’t be too worried about whatever I end up eating. I still consider that I’m transitioning into this way of eating and even if I adopt it as my preferred eating regime there will always be times when I lapse. However from what I’m reading, my body will let me know what it thinks about the lapse, so perhaps it won’t happen too often.

New Season Ginger

In the past months I have experienced many new things including real ginger (as compared to the dried powder variety). But it seems not all gingers are the same. Food Connect kindly included some new season ginger and even more kindly mentioned in their newsletter that it needs to be kept in the fridge as it doesn’t have bark and so can dry out easily.

I have generally found real ginger to be quite strong and so haven’t finished a piece very quickly. But this new season ginger seems to be a bit more subtle and I’ve included some finely chopped ginger on both my lunch-time salad and my evening meal and ended up enjoying both. This isn’t at all like me as I have shied away from ginger in the past but now I seem to have found a variety that sits well with me. A web site suggests that for thousands of years, ginger has been used to aid digestion, nausea, menstrual cramps, and flu symptoms, and it's also traditionally been used to treat arthritis and heart conditions. I am really pleased about this as I’m concerned that my sore knuckles could be a precursor to arthritis.

In the same way, I’m pleased with the path that I’m on and what makes it even more comfortable is that I seem to be treading a path already taken by others, even though my path is happening much later…

In 2005, Steve Pavlina wrote about reading “The China Study” which at that time was one of the top 500 selling books at Amazon, with a 4.5 star rating. If I’m reading its current sales rank correctly then it is much lower in the list but still with its 4.5 star rating and it seems to have remained very topical as I have noticed this book mentioned often in blogs or articles that I’ve been reading lately.

One of his most telling statements was that when he ate a whole foods vegan diet (as opposed to a more junky vegan diet that includes refined or processed foods), he could eat as many calories as he wanted and not gain weight. I must remember that I can and most likely need to eat much more as I experiment with this way of eating.

Another interesting comment he made was that many people now recommend giving up dairy before giving up meat as dairy products are among the most unhealthy garbage you could possibly want to put in your body. I’m now 3 days into giving up dairy as I’m no longer drinking cow’s milk cappuccinos and it has been some time since I brought a carton of cow’s milk into my home. It’s too soon to know how well this is working out but I’ll have a better idea a little further down the track.

At the end of 2007, Steve announced he would kick off 2008 with a 30-day trial of eating a 100% raw vegan diet. He mentions his experiences with raw food diets in the past and also about reading books and listening to audio programs from long-term raw foodists, including Dr. Douglas Graham who has written “The 80/10/10 Diet” book. Steve's final post at the end of the 30-day trial made interesting reading.

It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one going through this process. Changing one’s eating habits can be challenging particularly when they emanate from deep-seated, long-term patterns. The best part is that trolling the web shows me that there are definite personal rewards for taking the time to work out what’s best for me.

CSA and Strawberry Sauce

I’ve signed with Food Connect, a community shared agriculture (CSA) enterprise that provides mostly organic seasonal fruit and vegetables that is sourced from local farmers around Brisbane.

I heard about Food Connect a few years back and liked the concept of eating food that has been grown locally with a minimum distance to travel to reach my plate. At the time I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. However recently things changed and I signed up and received my first box earlier this week.

There were all sorts of concerns running through my mind before I signed up. Would there be too much in the box? Would there be enough choice? The feast/famine mentality was certainly there. Wouldn’t I be better off buying as I need so I could get exactly what I want? This question really resonated with me as I pondered how I could test and blog about recipes when I was receiving seasonal food. Clearly I’ve been spoilt over the years by the ready availability that mass transport allows.

It turns out that my concerns were unfounded. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety of vegetables that I’ve received. There are vegetables that I have stir fried, some that I can steam and some that contribute very nicely to my salad at lunch-time. The fruit that I received can and has contributed to my breakfast or else added to my salad or made up into a nice dressing as I mention below.

This is all really helpful as with the arrival of summer I am no longer producing very much on my patios which led to my thinking that this was the right time to participate in this system.

In preparation for the arrival of my first box, I checked through my Thermomix cookbooks to see what I might like to try. And I found a couple of variations of a strawberry sauce – strawberries with lemon juice and sugar (Everyday) or with juice and zest of an orange along with honey (Quick Dessert Syrup in the Gluten Free Wheat Free Cooking book). I decided to simplify a bit further and blended a punnet of strawberries with the juice of an orange. To be honest, I bought an orange in order to try this sauce which I’m fine with as I’ve accepted that I might need to supplement what I receive from Food Connect occasionally.

It turned out so nicely that I was then inspired to make some waffles to go with it, and then the rest decorated my salad the next day. I’m not normally drawn to strawberries but this sauce really hit the spot – twice.