You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2010.
Well, in my case, lots of yummy things! Why don’t you drop over to Nourishing Days and see my list?
Shannon has done a great job putting together this great series. I’ve really been enjoying reading everyone’s entries, and now it’s my turn!
wtf?! i may have to write a new verse of my song...kombucha, i'm gonna miss yaaa 
by Shira Golding, on Flickr
There was quite an uproar last week when Whole Foods pulled kombucha off its shelves. Those stung by the recent removal of raw milk complained that it was another “corporate sell out to fear of litigation.” Some said they weren’t surprised, that anything containing “that much” alcohol should be regulated lest we poison the kids. Others called those who have received a light buzz off a bottle of kombucha a bunch of fakers.
There was no kombucha on the shelves Wednesday when I did the shopping. I asked my local health food store (NOT a Whole Foods Market) and was referred to a website that contains a lot of good information about this issue, including regular updates and information about affected brands.
But it’s time to set the record straight. This was not a matter of litigation fear. It started when Lindsey Lohan’s SCRAM-shackle (a court-ordered device measuring alcohol content in the blood) blared an alarm on June 5 that there was alcohol in her bloodstream after the MTV Movie Awards. The actress swore she had only been drinking kombucha, and that’s what caught the attention of the grand poohbahs at Whole Foods. A corporate giant pulling a hot seller from the shelves got the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau talking to the FDA, who decided they needed to intervene.
On June 16, UNFI (United Natural Foods, Inc., a major distributor of natural, organic and specialty foods) halted the sale of kombucha products and recommended the same to their member retailers. A statement issued yesterday by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) frames the issue more as a labeling problem than anything:
TTB plans to take samples of kombucha products from the marketplace and test their alcohol content in order to determine if the products are labeled in compliance with Federal law. If TTB finds alcohol beverages that are not labeled in accordance with Federal law, we will take appropriate steps to bring them into compliance. TTB will consult with FDA to ensure that the affected products comply with applicable Federal laws. If the testing results from this labeling initiative indicate potential violations of the IRC, they will be referred to the appropriate office within TTB for further investigation, as necessary.
Right now, I imagine most brands are scrambling to test and submit data, as well as working on possible label redesign. I envision the legal departments of kombucha brewers burning the midnight oil. But it doesn’t look like FDA wants to permanently remove kombucha from the marketplace just yet.
So, what will you do? Will you home brew? Give up your habit? If FDA comes back and says it’s too alcoholic for sale in grocery and health food stores, will you still buy it? Would you go to a liquor store to buy it if that is the only place you can get it?
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
I love berry season. It is way too short, in my book. Someday I definitely want several berry bushes in my yard both for us and for the lovely birds they attract! Right now, where I live, blueberries are in season. I try to buy enough blueberries to dry and keep on hand all year, but the big baskets we get at the farmer’s market rarely get as far as the dehydrator before they get eaten!
At only 81 calories a cup, blueberries are relatively low in calories for the flavor punch they pack. They also have anthocyanins, which provide their color. Anthocyanins work together with vitamin C to neutralize free radical damage to your tissues and work with your body to repair collagen for healthy skin and connective tissues. Unfortunately, anthocyanins don’t survive the canning process, so be sure to freeze or dry (at low heat) extra berries. Blueberries have even more antioxidant action than red wine, so the teetotalers among us needn’t feel shortchanged!
Of course, berries are delicious in pancakes and muffins, but can turn your food strange colors when they are cooked. In acids (lemon juice, vinegar) they can turn reddish. In base combinations (baking soda), they can turn an even darker blue. If your muffin batter has too much baking soda, the blueberries will turn the batter greenish blue! But, to preserve the vitamin C in the berries and keep the B vitamins from leaching out, it’s best to eat these gems raw. Wash berries immediately before eating to protect them from spoilage.
We use dried blueberries to combat diarrhea and urinary tract infections. A tea of a few teaspoons of dried blueberries steeped in boiling water can be enjoyed a couple times a day. The tannins in the blueberries stop diarrhea very effectively, and the acids in the berries will keep bacteria from adhering to the urinary tract and colon (much like cranberry juice, but tastier!) There has been some research indicating one of the bacteria blueberries repel particularly well is our old nemesis, E. Coli.
Blueberries are a classic pairing with peaches, which are just coming into season here. I made this salad for lunch the other day. It combines fresh peaches with chicken leftover from making stock, some standard salad ingredients and is topped with blueberries. The dressing complements the fresh flavors with cinnamon and lemon.
Peachy Chicken Salad
serves 6 as a main course salad
1 head organic green leaf lettuce
1 thinly organic red onion
2 small organic cucumbers
3 ripe organic peaches
4 cups cooked pastured chicken
1 1/2 cups organic blueberries
For dressing:
juice of 3 organic lemons
rind of 1 organic lemon, grated
1/2 cup extra virgin organic olive oil
1 teaspoon flax oil
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
2 teaspoons organic cinnamon
1/4 cup creme fraiche
Combine the dressing ingredients in a pint jar, screw the lid on tightly and shake to combine. Set aside.
Wash all fruits and vegetables and chop small, leaving blueberries whole. Chop chicken into small pieces. Toss all fruits and veggies together in a bowl with chicken except blueberries. Serve salad, stream dressing over and top with blueberries.
A word on organic ingredients: Blueberries and peaches are on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen list, onions are on the clean fifteen. I would not use the rind of a non-organic lemon for eating.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop. Hey, lookie there…blueberries!
Kaitlyns Birthday Gifts by Elizabeth/Table4Five, on Flickr
I haven’t posted anything about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico for many reasons. I have been reading a lot of commentary and listening to the voices of people much wiser and well spoken than I, watching news reports, listening to political rhetoric and environmentalist anger. But something’s been brewing in my head this whole time.
Wikipedia says peak oil is “the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.” Some experts believe we are already at the peak and others believe it is about twenty to twenty-five years off. Regardless of where we sit on the curve of oil viability, we are being told to conserve. Right now, the focus of conservation efforts seems to be gasoline usage. I guess since people see the gasoline going into their car and recognize it as a petroleum product, it’s a fair place to start.
But what about the supermarket? Can we learn to see oil there? If I am eating an apple in June in the northern hemisphere, how far did my food travel to reach me? Did it go by boat? Plane? Truck? All three? I’m guilty of eating bananas in Tennessee, kiwi in Oregon and pineapple in California, and all out of season. Coconuts for my beloved coconut oil are not local. Neither is my coffee, my cocoa powder or my sea salt.
I am guilty of picking up a ten pound (plastic) bag of organic potatoes rather than weighing out ten pounds in my own canvas bag. As Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish reminds us, plastic is a petroleum product. (Her thought-provoking take on the oil spill can be read here.) Looking through my home, I see petroleum everywhere, but nowhere in more abundance than my kitchen. Even though I’ve gotten rid of the plastic food storage containers, I still have appliances and tools of plastic, coatings on the shelves in my pantry, ceiling lighting fixtures, the paint on the wall. It’s everywhere.
It’s also in my food. According to the FDA, if…The names include a prefix FD&C, D&C, or External D&C; a color; and a number. An example is “FD&C Yellow No. 5.” Certified colors also may be identified in cosmetic ingredient declarations by color and number alone, without a prefix (such as “Yellow 5″) then your ingredient is made from petroleum. Made from petroleum. As in, “pass the unleaded.”
Vitamin capsules are made from petroleum, and the vitamins they contain use petroleum as a solvent to extract their active ingredients. If “enriched” appears on the label of a food item you are eating, the vitamins and minerals enriching your food were produced using petroleum as a solvent. Rubbing alcohol and vinegar, two of my “safe” cleaning products are made from petroleum, as is my daughter’s lipstick. Some of my most beloved products—raw milk, cod liver oil capsules and sea salt—come in plastic containers.
It would not be possible for me to reduce my usage of petroleum to zero. The extremist in me will just have to acknowledge that and deal. But I’m seeing the oil now. When I put something plastic in the recycle bin, I see the oil. When I put the DVD in the player, I see the oil. When I vacuum my carpet, I see the oil. And every time I see the oil, I know that my insatiable lust for more—more convenience, more speed, more stuff—is what caused the oil spill that now threatens far more than “just a piece of ocean.”
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
I get such a kick out of seeing what my friends pick up at the Farmers Market each week. Usually we photograph what we bought and tweet it, but my market trips are usually too big for one photo. For example, here is what I got this week:
Four heads of lettuce, three cucumbers, a bunch of parsley, a box of sugar snap peas, four onions, two heads of broccoli, two pints of blueberries and three gallons of milk
Two more gallons of milk, three packages each of beef jerky and snack sticks (like Slim Jims), two packages hot dogs, two pounds of ground beef, two pounds of freshly ground peanut butter
Four dozen eggs, some chive/onion cheddar, three pints of (non-ultrapasteurized) cream, a wedge of aged cheddar
The snack sticks and jerky are something I like to keep around in summer. Very often it’s too hot to eat a meal at lunchtime, but I know the kids won’t make it until dinner on an empty stomach. They are made from grassfed beef and are nitrite/nitrate-free. Same goes for the hot dogs. There are times you just need a hot dog, you know? If we have any leftover baked beans from dinner tonight, I’ll probably chop up some hot dogs and add them in to punch up the leftovers a little. I’m going to use the chive/onion cheddar on quesadillas one lunch this week. I bought two baskets of blueberries: one for eating and one for muffins. Any leftovers will get pureed and frozen for smoothies or adding to popsicles.
Our market is growing. Each week there seem to be more producers, and within each producer’s area there are more items and greater variety. Late spring is such a great time to eat!
The kombucha was done brewing but not yet cold, and the 100° weather was drying me out faster than a swimsuit hung in the sun. I longed for a sip of sweet, tart, tangy elixir to both cool me off and help my body recover from too long in the heat. So, I poured a jar of plain kombucha and grabbed the ice cube tray. Someone put it away empty again, one of the perils of living in a house with other humans, I suppose.
Then the bag of strawberry cubes caught my eye. Fruit I’d juiced and frozen in a spare ice cube tray was sitting there, cold and sweet and ready to drop in my drink! I grabbed one and dropped it in my drinking jar. It began to melt and meld its lovely color and sweetness into my brewed and fermented tea. The taste was heavenly, like biting into a fresh berry that had been splashed with balsamic vinegar! Each sip was restorative and restful, stimulating and sensual. I felt restored, renewed and ready to face the kitchen for dinner prep.
Ah, sweet strawberry kombucha, you are ambrosia!
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
One of my biggest problems with eating seasonally and locally is storage space. Take strawberries, for example. They seem to be in season here and available at my Farmers Market for about 3 weeks. Three weeks is such a short window for a berry lover, and the other 49 weeks of the year are so long!
I suppose I could take my wonderful berries and turn them into jam, can them and stack them in the cupboard, but I hate adding a bunch of sugar to already perfectly sweet berries and then processing all the vitamin C out of them in a canner.
I could dehydrate them, but they do seem to lose a little something in the translation. Still, drying is a great method for not adding sugar and keeping the fruit shelf-stable for a few extra weeks.
But by far my favorite thing to do with strawberries is to make food cubes. I used to make portable baby food for my little ones by pureeing leftovers and freezing them in ice cube trays. No more babies in the house, but my ice cube trays still see leftovers!
When we’ve eaten our fill of the week’s berries and there are just a few too-soft ones left, I’ll run them through the juicer and make ice cubes from the juice. Now they are frozen and ready to blend into a smoothie at my convenience.
I do this with all kinds of food from berries (in the juicer if they have seeds, otherwise in the blender) to shredded zucchini!
I have a teensy bit more room in the freezer than in the fridge, and storing cubes in a plastic bag allows them to “squish” a bit so they fit into spaces where nothing else will. I do not like storing food in plastic, but this is my one exception. There is just no more room for jars in my fridge and freezer!
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
Boy, that Kimi Harris sure can cook! I love the budget-friendly recipes she features on her site, The Nourishing Gourmet. This salad is perfect for this time of year, featuring fresh, seasonal veggies from my farmer’s market, sprouted lentils and a homemade dressing. Here‘s her recipe.
I did two things differently than the original recipe. The first was to sprout the lentils. Just about any grain or legume can be sprouted, and it is well worth the extra step for the increased nutrition you’ll reap! Lentils on their own have a very good protein profile, deficient in just two amino acids, and these two are boosted greatly by sprouting. The other thing I changed was to cook the lentils in homemade chicken stock rather than water. I work hard to get stock into as many meals as possible here because of its tremendous health benefits.
I topped the salad off with some ricotta cheese I had leftover in the fridge. Feta would have been better, but ricotta’s what I had.
A Tuesday Twister post, at Gnowfglins!
We started making Pizza Rice long before our real food journey began. Rice is a wonderfully filling food that is also very versatile. Combined with your favorite pizza toppings, it’s an easy lunch that is easy on the budget! Of course, the toppings you choose will change the cost of the dish, but that’s what’s so great about Pizza Rice. Splurge on more expensive ingredients when the budget is generous, cut back when it’s tight and let everyone choose their own toppings!
Pizza Rice
serves 6
2 cups germinated brown rice
2 cups homemade chicken stock
3 tablespoons tomato paste
Italian herbs such as basil, oregano, tarragon, to your liking
8 ounces grated mozzarella cheese
Toppings
Bring the chicken stock to a boil and add germinated rice. Return to a boil, then turn down as low as possible and cover the pan. I find my germinated rice cooks in about 45 minutes. Drain off all but a tablespoon or two of stock and add tomato paste and herbs. Stir around until well mixed, then add grated cheese. Stir and warm gently until melted. Serve with whatever toppings you like on pizza. Each person can add their own toppings, or you can mix it up in the pan. Our favorites are black olives, pineapple, and sometimes pepperoni or sausage.
Germinating the brown rice is an additional step that you may choose not to do. A good 7-hour soak in an acid medium (water with lemon juice works well) is sufficient for most purposes, but germinating the rice by soaking for 20 hours at 85-110° adds many health benefits, including better digestion. My allergic daughter tolerates germinated rice much, much better than rice that has been only soaked.
Shockingly close results of a recent Wii "Everybody Votes Channel" survey
When water bottles were first popularized, Grandmother said, “Why do adults want to go around sucking on a bottle like a baby? Ridiculous!” We laughed about that, because Grandmother was hopelessly behind the times. The water tastes better, and we were paying for it, so it must be cleaner and healthier than what comes out of our city tap. Besides, we were all trying to lose weight and staying hydrated was an important part of that plan. How were we to stay hydrated without a plastic water bottle? A filthy germ-ridden water fountain? I think not!
Of course, that was decades before the studies showing that bottled water was just water from our city tap, that it was full of bacteria even more dangerous than a drinking fountain, that the plastic in the bottle leeched BPA into the water which switched our endocrine systems to “permanent weight gain” mode and before we knew where all those used water bottles went.
Come on, people. If you really can’t go the duration of a trip away from home without something to drink, carry a reusable bottle. Find a water fountain if you’re really, truly in dire need. But let’s ditch the plastic bottles. They just aren’t doing anyone any good and they are doing a whole lot of people a whole lot of harm.
If you haven’t yet, please go watch Anne Leonard’s The Story of Bottled Water. It is a real eye-opener.
As they sang in Guys and Dolls:
Follow the fold and stray no more
Stray no more, stray no more.
Put down the bottle and we’ll say no more
Follow, follow, the fold.
Before you take another swallow!
This post is part of Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
