Un-Cook Books

I bought my darling a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day and a pile of books for me. Yep. I went online to Amazon.com looking for raw un-cook books. Most raw recipes I have found so far feed an army of six and I am just one—Moose has a whole other diet. So I let my mouse do the walking. I purchased “Alive in 5—Raw Gourmet Meals in Five Minutes” by Angela Elliott, “Ultimate Raw Vegan Chocolate Recipes” by Kristine Suzanne—hey, it was Valentine’s Day—and “Raw Food Made Easy—for 1 or 2 People” by Jennifer Cornbleet. I liked the fact that Jennifer’s last name looked edible.

After reading all three cookbooks, I found that “Raw Food Made Easy” may be the most useful. Both Ms. Cornbleet—I loved that name—and Ms. Elliott had complete information on how to set up a raw kitchen, what utensils to buy, and when to use them. The chocolate book had pretty pictures.

“Raw Food Made Easy” covered a wider range of flavors including Asian, East Indian, Mexican, and Italian. I craved Italian. Because the portions were smaller I could visualize preparing the food daily. Jennifer Cornbleet had some of my favorite foods listed in a raw version like Olive Tapenade and a mock spaghetti recipe—“Zucchini Pasta al Presto with Marinara Sauce and Not Meat Balls.” Oh, yum. Her book included full menu ideas and a collection of raw desserts for my Sunday cheats.

Hope you will get the spirit to try something new this week. BTW you can go on Amazon and preview the books and a couple recipes.

I gained two-tenths of a pound. Given the holiday and the past month’s events, I can’t complain.

Fruit Bars

Yesterday I made my first fruit bars. This whole-fresh-raw thing is scary to me. I have shied away from making anything that looked like baked goods for fear of difficulty and disastrous results.

After spending my usual two hours surfing the internet, I found enough information to make me dangerous—an informed neophyte. This was what I learned.

Raw fruit Bars are a combination of dry ingredients and wet/damp ones in equal proportions.

Dry—Choose a mix of two items up to a total of 1 to 2 cups
Sprouted Almonds finely chopped, sprouted flax seed ground, sesame seed ground, chocolate nibs lightly ground, or pecans chopped.

Wet— Choose two items place in food processor till thoroughly mixed for a total of 1 to 2 cups
Medjool Dates pitted, dried cherries, dried cranberries, fresh cranberries, raisins, dried figs reconstituted, fresh figs.

Mix—1 cup dry and 1 cup wet together. I have a small one cup food processor plus a coffee grinder I use exclusively for nuts and nibs. So I made these batches in small groups. You can do the same with a larger food processor.

Add—Spices. I like allspice and cinnamon. You pick your favorites about a teaspoon of each.
1 tablespoon of Meyer lemon juice or orange juice
1 teaspoon of citrus zest.

Taste.

Add—2 to 3 tablespoons of honey or Agave syrup to taste.

Taste.

If the texture is very wet add more dry ingredients. If dry add more wet.
I found using reconstituted figs and fresh cherries caused my mixture to be wet.
Press the mixture into a greased or lined pan to be cut into bars. Or roll into balls. Top with finely chopped nuts or coconut. Refrigerate for an hour then eat. Delicious.

If you want very dry more portable bars, you can dehydrate them in a warm oven for about two hours. Calories per bar depends on the combination of ingredients. Each bar is packed with vitamins and minerals. Fruit bars are great snacks in the winter.

Spring Cleaning Continued

Part of the diet vigil includes knowing what is going into my mouth at all times. I have already cleaned out the sodium laden canned goods and sugar based products to be on this diet. The other day, I wrote about dumping old lipstick. Today, let’s focus on the really scary stuff—the things in the kitchen.

Be honest, when did you last go into the cupboards and dump old spices? The refrigerator and dump barbeque sauce or mayonnaise?

Within my tradition of January and June cleaning, I need to attack the stuff normally ignored—the pricey items we buy for one purpose leave to sit for years in the cupboard. At $3.95 to $9.00 a bottle, spices are held in protective custody to be utilized when and if another recipe calls for it, which by-the-way usually doesn’t happen within the same year.

Let’s talk pumpkin spice. Have some? When did it get purchased? And when was the last time you used it? Exactly, I don’t remember either. I look at spice jar after spice jar unsure as to its age, my eyeballs skewed trying to read the tiny use-by-date stamped on the jar.

Take a look in my spice rack. Allspice used it last spring for a carrot cake recipe. Dump. Arrowroot—Chinese food last week. Friday taco night used Cayenne pepper and Chile powder. Cinnamon, cloves and ginger in all the Christmas desserts. Caraway seeds went into Irish Soda bread made special for Pastor Murphy in September. Ground coriander…hmmm…coriander. I’m not sure what recipe used coriander. Uh. Dump. And so on…

Now when I say dump, I mean take the contents of the spice jar and dump the contents, carefully clean the jar keeping the label pristine, then when you need the spice buy it in bulk or loose—twice a year—January and June. Health food stores, herb shops, Mexican groceries, Chinese stores and farmer markets sell spices in plastic packages or bulk at a fraction of the price of those bottled spices.

You can purchase fresh herbs like thyme, dill, and bay leaf in your grocery store. Fresh is good tasting and good health. If you are feeling particularly farmer-like you can pick up an herb-dish-garden at the local nursery or hardware store. My cousin Thia grows her own salsa garden—tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, onions, cilantro, and garlic. Thia comes from Minnesota which explains her cultivation obsession.

Next walk over to that refrigerator. Take a look at those condiment jars. What do you think grows in them after a month or two? When my husband’s best friend, Spyros lived with us, he purchased different sauces and toppings every week. He liked to experiment with flavor. After a few months I couldn’t figure out what was old and what was new. To solve the problem, I dated the bottles as to the month they were opened then threw away anything over six months old.

I now toss anything over one month old. Mayonnaise-based products are dumped after one week. I’m afraid of food poisoning.

Food, like makeup or anything else for that matter, should be purchased as you need it, stored sealed, then dumped in a reasonable length of time after it’s been opened. This is simple common sense my foremothers taught me.

Happy Spring Cleaning!

Comment

Beth—my friend, mentor, and blog reader—pointed out that the marmalade recipe may dilute the vitamin C content from over cooking. I disagreed at first, but the more I think about it, she may be right. I altered the recipe to enhance the vitamin C. This weekend after picking another peck of oranges, I will try the recipe out. The flavor should be similar to the previous recipe.


Almost Raw Organic Orange Marmalade ala Pam
Into pan on the stove
• 2 cups of fresh squeezed orange juice
• Zest of 3 oranges sliced in thin ribbons
• Zest of ½ organic Meyer lemon
• 2 Tblsp Candied ginger if desired
Cook on low heat until the rind is soft and yummy. Shut of the burner and set the pan on trivet to cool.
While warm add
• 1 jar about one pound of organic honey
• Pulp of 10 organic large orange sections – no white parts. Double the amount of oranges if they are small
• Pulp of 1 Meyer lemon—no white parts
Mix thoroughly
Cool to room temperature
Mix in 1 package No Cook Pectin.
Stir for 3 minutes

Ladle into 3 small Ball brand plastic freezer jars or containers you already have
Refrigerate for 1 hour before eating—freeze or give away the rest.

Oranges

When my husband and I decided to buy a home, we originally looked for a condo with a tiny backyard. I want little or no work outside of the home. What we bought was a four bedroom single family dwelling with almost a quarter of an acre. Ah, good intentions.

Built in 1979, our place has eight fruit trees—two apricots, crabapple, Granny Smith apple, ornamental plum, pomegranate, Meyer lemon, and an orange tree. All the trees—except the pomegranate, a gift from my cousin Cindy last year—are thirty years old. The centers of the trees are decayed and full of termites and ants. The outer edges are producing a multitude of offspring in the form of fruit beyond the imaginings of this city girl.

This summer I had so much organic apricots that I made jar after jar of apricot butter. The recipe I found on line and required only fruit, sugar, and a crock pot. I gave away ten freezer jars of the stuff and froze three pints for us. The last one, I opened yesterday.

Then came January, with a bumper crop of Meyer lemons and unidentified oranges, I am on my third picking of the citrus fruit. My neighbors run into their houses and lock the doors when they see me approaching with bags of lemons. The oranges are harder yet to give away. The lemons are perfect in flavor and juice but the oranges are small and not sour but a tad on the tart side. When I offer oranges the question is always, “Are they sweet?”

“Well, no. A little on the tart side.”

The victim screws up his or her nose and shakes the head a clear, “No, thank you.”

This morning my kitchen counter displayed three pounds of lemons and about thirty pounds of washed oranges. What to do? What to do?

I went online downloaded a lovely article published by the University of California, Davis. All about oranges, it tells of the care and feeding of the plant plus a few ideas about what to do with this sunny fruit. I did a Google, Bing, and Ask search of orange recipes. Most covered orange marmalade. Some recipes instructed the creation of cordials, candied citrus circles, and orange cheesecake. The recipe with the largest amount of orange usage was a marmalade recipe that called for nine oranges and four cups of sugar. That is correct. Nine oranges and four cups of sugar. That is not jam that is a sugar high.

I read fifteen marmalade recipes including a raw marmalade recipe that asked me to cook one-third of the recipe then mix in the other two-thirds cultured with Kefir whey—whatever that is. I was absolutely sure I didn’t have it in the cupboard. Plus the raw dude wanted me use gelatin instead of pectin. Why no pectin? Maybe, I thought, it was a chemical based product but according to UC Davis pectin is made from the white-pulpy part of the orange. Sounds natural to me.

So I decided to make my own recipe. Yea. I know. What the heck do I know about making jam? I made a lot of apricot jam this summer. The way I looked at it, there were thirty pounds of oranges sitting on the counter and heaven knows how many more out on the tree. What did to lose other than time?

Organic Orange Marmalade ala Pam

Into a clean crock pot

• 2 cups of fresh squeezed orange juice
• Zest of 3 oranges sliced in thin ribbons. Okay I was having so much fun with the zester that makes the thin ribbons that I put the zest of 10 oranges in it and it was too bitter so I had to pull out much of the zest. So don’t make the same mistake. If you don’t have a zester then you need to scrape all the white out of the orange peel and finely slice the rind. Good luck.
• Pulp of 10 organic orange sections – no white parts. I used 20 oranges because my crop was small this year. If you buy oranges they will be larger so you will need less.
• Zest of ½ organic Meyer lemon
• Pulp of 1 Meyer lemon—no white parts
• 1 jar about one pound of organic honey
• I had some leftover candied ginger from Christmas and threw that in the crock pot

Heat on low heat until the rind is soft and yummy
Cool to room temperature
3 Minutes Mix in 1 package No Cook Pectin (I got that Wal-Mart last fall)

Ladle into 3 small Ball brand plastic freezer jars or containers you already have
Refrigerate for 1 hour before eating—freeze or give away the rest.

I am Not a Bear

Part of my dedication the raw food diet and this blog involves reading magazines, books, and internet articles on the raw world. Overwhelmingly, authors start their appeal to the reader to join this type of diet, usually in chapter one, by comparing our current eating habits—Standard American Diet (SAD) to that which occurs in nature. Bears eat fish in season then the next day eat berries. Elephants eat diets of vegetation. "We are the only animal that cooks." This is somehow supposed to motivate the reader to eat nothing but raw uncooked foods.

A bear may live on raw foods but she does not compose symphonies, create sophisticated cities with millions inhabitants, search for the cure for childhood diabetes, or learn how to square dance with ten other couples. Humans are unique in their need to socialize and interact with large numbers of their kind. Please do not point out bees or parrots. Large numbers yes. But complex socializations no. How many bees work a full time job, attend church and volunteer at a local charity, while rearing two children? I think none.

Please understand my diet is now about seventy percent uncooked and came close to ninety percent during the melon season. Yum. I am sorry I can't go the full Monty on this one. I am not a bear. The comparison of our eating habits to our fellow creatures is weak and missing the basic human factor. We are community creatures.

If we look back at ancient cave dwellers and current tribes that still live what we call a primitive existence, we will see human groups coming together for safety, love, and sharing of food. It’s that sharing of the meal that brings us to cooked and mixed foods.

Do you know the old Sunday school story about “Rock Soup?”

A town and surrounding region devastated a blight made food scarce. Most people there hadn’t eaten for days.

A man sat in the town square with a big pot of water boiling over an open fire. He stirred the pot with a wooden spoon.

A couple walked up to him. “What are you cooking?” They asked.

He gave it another stir, “Rock soup,” he said then tasted the liquid. “Mmm. Almost done.”

The couple watched him sip the soup. “We have a potato. If we add it to the soup, can we share it with you?”

“Oh yes. A potato would add more flavor to the soup.”

A few moments later, a woman walked up and asked the same series of questions. She offered a carrot. More people came by. Soon the town was busy with people adding their bits to the soup. After all the people had a bowl of the finished product, they proclaimed rock soup the best meal they’d eaten in a long time.

The moral of the story had to do with sharing. I think it is a better example of how we came to cook meal.

Our bodies do not need all the junk we stuff into it. The proof is that Americans are getting fatter and sicker. But becoming a bear—eating only raw fish one day and berries the next—is not realistic either. Socially, we gather to share to feed, nurture, and love one another. Have you ever belonged to any group where food was not served within the first few meetings? Even the Raw Society here in Sacramento has monthly potlucks. There is a balance to achieve with a predominately vegetarian life style. In my book it includes shared meals—organic raw and occasionally cooked foods.

Not a Great Week

My husband is in surgery having a Vitrectomy eye surgery. I wait.

When we got the date, the memories of past hospitalization that I kept suppressed, started surfacing in bits—his hip repair, the cataract on the left eye, the cataract on the right, the peritoneal implant, and multiple amputations of the right foot and leg. With each memory came the need to eat.

Not surprising, as I had plumped-up ninety pounds in the past three years, the solution to all my stress rotated around eating. Candy bars, cookies, French fries, and burgers equaled comfort. With days turning into weeks and months of hospital bed vigils, food became a reliable friend to meet the anguish and frustration wrapped around an ailing husband.

As you know, I had to battle that pattern to lose forty-two pounds these past four months.

But this week, I slipped back into old patterns. No French Fries. However, the raw chocolates sitting in the refrigerator started to call to me on a daily basis. I had a half of chocolate after dinner then one lunch and finally I threw them in the trash—with no regrets. The next day, the Medjool Dates container somehow sat on the counter. I had two, three, four, and more before they were put away. I drank less water. I ate more peanut butter. By Sunday, I wanted to eat every half hour.

This morning on the scales, my backsliding showed in a one pound weight gain. Skipping breakfast, because Paul had to fast for the surgery, I pledged to not shove my emotions onto a spoon and push them down to my waistline. So after sending him to surgery, I wandered down to the hospital cafeteria.

At a quarter to one, the food line was crowded with staff, doctors, nurses, and waiting loved ones like me. I found the salad bar, made a spinach salad with egg, grabbed a fruit bowl, water, and headed to the register.

The gentleman in scrubs in front of me had grill cheese sandwich with the specialty of the day tomato bisque soup. The couple behind me had Diet sodas, cheeseburgers with fries, and cookies. I found a table to share with a hospital administrator. She finished a plate of fried fish and fries. She left but came back with a coffee, scone, and pudding. In the entire room of predominately hospital personnel, not one person opted for a lunch of fresh vegetables and fruit as I did. The majority had a sugary-based treat to go with the popular greasy dishes.

Okay, I know that these places are set up with the desserts first, ice cream and candy bars close to the register, and fried foods being the order of the day. But this is a hospital. Shouldn’t the cafeteria be a little more proactive in the food offering?

The salad bar really sums up the intent. Start with spinach leaves and lettuce in the big bins. Next fried tofu mixed with veggies in an oil dressing, potato salad, macaroni salad, and a mix of spaghetti and veggies in a large bowls. The smaller bowls offered cucumbers, beets, olives, egg, beans, tomatoes, chickpeas, green beans, peppers, and corn. The end of the display housed five dressings—one low calorie—and toppings of sunflower seeds, raisins, and croutons. The salad bar included fried food and pasta. How easy would it be for anyone to add the calorie laden offering when dishing up a salad?

I recently read an article in Raw Food magazine. The traveling writer started with this theme, don’t leave home without food. The thought is that in the real world—outside of your home—sugar, fat, and carbs lurk around every corner. She traveled with carrots, apples, and almonds.

For me, it’s water. I need water to cut hunger and make me say no to the bad stuff. So here I am waiting for Paul to sail through his surgery, armed with a bottle of Calistoga.