What am I doing?

Recipe: Vegetable Ferments

We’re five months into the year 2010, and I’m sure a few of you reading this made New Year’s resolutions. How are you doing with them?

I’ve read different statistics, varying from 90% resolutions gone by the wayside by February, to 90% by the end of the year. Either way, the trend is to not follow through on these commitments.

Why do so many of us ‘fail’ at our resolutions? They are noble aspirations, and we know they’re good for us, right?

Do we really understand how change works in our lives?

I have a passion for change. Having spent many years practicing Buddhism, among other spiritual paths, it’s an ongoing contemplation for me.

One of the central teachings in Buddhism is that change is always happening. Whether slowly or quickly, we are changing, our environment is changing, our thoughts and feelings are changing. Always. This is a given. Nothing stays static.

So, what we are talking about here, is making the change that is already happening, conscious. There is usually some kind of momentum to the patterns of change in our life, an inertia. With a resolution we seek to change the direction of that already existing flow.

Holding this in mind when we approach a resolution can help bring into focus the underpinnings of the resolution - namely - what are we doing? What is the flow that is already occurring? It can be very tempting to skip this acknowledgment. We tend to lean forward to the next thing, give me the next thing, the better thing - get me away from this thing I don’t like. This ill health, this body or mind that doesn’t feel good. I know I’ll feel better if I quit smoking or drinking alcohol, go on a diet, go to the health club, get more sleep, ....

These habits we look to change didn’t appear out of nowhere. And most of them didn’t appear yesterday. They have served us in some way. Perhaps buffered us from some discomfort, helped us get through some difficulty. Bonded us with friends, family and tribe perhaps. Given us an identity.

Some examples might be - ‘There’s was rarely enough food to eat when I was growing up, and now it’s hard not to eat everything on my plate, even when I’m really not hungry anymore. Part of me is afraid there won’t be anything for the next meal.’

‘I have always felt shy and awkward. Having a couple of drinks helps me relax and I can have conversations more easily.’

‘My mom and I loved to make cookies together after school. It was the only time I really felt like I had all her attention. Now eating sweet things makes me feel loved and special.’

‘i just feel like I have to be doing something all the time. Having a cigarette is a good excuse to take a break. I don’t know if I’d take breaks if I didn’t smoke. Besides, having a cigarette with a friend is just a ritual I LOVE.’

‘Working 80 hours a week is killing me, but I’m so afraid I won’t have enough money to retire on!’

Your story may be different. But there’s a story associated with all these habits we’d like to break, whether it’s a story about our past, our present, or our future. And often the stories about our present and future have roots in the past.

In future posts I’ll explore more about making our changes conscious, but for this one I’d like to just rest here, with what is happening before we jump into the future.

What are you doing? Choose one habit you have thoughts about changing. Spend some time exploring that habit. What are you receiving from this activity? How does it serve you? If it doesn’t help you, how did it help you before? Where did it come from? How did it develop?

See if you can spend this time without judgment. You may be surprised to discover things you didn’t know about yourself. And, I hope you’ll find some forgiveness for your humanity. Perhaps some gratitude for how these things we’re ready to let go of have served us.


Vegetable Ferments
Gluten and Dairy-Free, low carb, candida appropriate (in fact, GREAT for candida sufferers! Lots of natural probiotics.)

I'm choosing the veggie ferment recipe for this post because I like the analogy. If we let ourselves sit still for a while, things will develop that may surprise us. If we eat it too soon, well, it just tastes like salty, raw vegetables.

Ingredients:

• 2 -3 pounds of shredded or thinly sliced or whole vegetable(s) of choice. Could be green cabbage for sauerkraut; a mix of napa cabbage, green onion, daikon radish, bok choi and red chili for kimchi; green beans and dill; carrots and garlic; or, of course, cucumber for a classic pickle.
• 1 - 2 Tbsp of good quality mineral salt - Celtic or Himalayan sea salt, or Real Salt
• 2 - 3 Tbsp brine from an earlier ferment, if available, (for non cabbage ferments only)

Directions:
For a cabbage based ferment, (or shredded beets or turnips) measure out about 2 tsp salt per pound of vegetable. Scatter the salt on the chopped veggies and toss to distribute. Cover with a kitchen towel and leave it for and hour or two. When you come back the vegetable should have released it's liquid. Massage it a little with your hands to help it along. Stuff it into a quart mason jar, leaving about an inch space above the vegetable, and lay a grape leaf over the top of it if you have one. Liquid should rise above the level of the vegetable. Cap jar tightly.

For non-cabbage or non-shredded veggies, cut to desired size and shape and stuff as tightly as possible into a quart mason jar, leaving about an inch of space to the top of the jar. Make a brine. Measure about 2 tsp of salt into a cup and a half of filtered or spring water and stir. Taste. The brine should taste too salty to be pleasant, but not so salty that you gag. (Thanks, Alyss for this great description of making a brine!) Add salt or water as needed to achieve the desired saltiness. Add brine from earlier ferment to the jar of veggies, if using, and pour the fresh brine over the vegetables, leaving about an inch head space. Lay a grape leaf over the top, if using. Cap it tightly.

Leave jar on your counter or in a cupboard for 3 - 7 days. Burp the jars daily to make sure the pressure doesn't build up too intensely. If the ferment looks very active to you, open it slowly over a sink, or wrapped in a kitchen towel - they can spray pretty hard! Press the vegetables down with a fork or spoon. Taste.

When the pickle tastes tart and sour to your liking, put it in your fridge or cool basement. Enjoy!

This post is a part of Kelly the Kitchen Kop's Real Food Wednesday!

Do You Dance?

Recipe: Cabbage Tonic, aka Non-Dairy Innoculant

I’m fond of saying that cooking is a dance. The food and our bodies ask for what they need to delight and be delighted in, to be nourished and nourishing, if we have the sensitivity to pay attention. It takes some experience and willingness to be open. Willingness to feel, sense deeper currents than just the following of a recipe. Willingness to touch the food - smell, hear, taste, see - really experience the substance that supports our bodies.

It takes a willingness to be quiet. Who leads in this dance may not be easy to feel. Our minds are full of the chatter of the stories of our lives. Where we have to go, who we have to see, what we have to do by when - and the ongoing pull and push between food and our bodies may be more subtle than those surface voices.

That dance is a vital one to pay attention to if we want to be healthy. Be connected with our true natures. If we want to be happy.

I’m not necessarily saying this dance will always be about eating what we might think of as perfectly healthy food. There are many influences on this dance, some cultural, some seasonal, some nutritional. Emotional. Our relationship with food is intertwined with our families, health, finances, creativity, communities, and history. It can be how we reward or punish ourselves. How we redeem ourselves.

It can include information we learn from books and health care practitioners, but, just as when we learn the steps to a new dance from an instructor, in the end things flow best when we make the dance our own. When we take what we’ve learned and see how it dances through us, how it finds it’s natural balance with the rest of the complexity that is our personal dance of life.

Our lack of relationship with food reflects on that list as well. If food is taken out of that equation, or if the relationship with food is too far distorted - you can sense the far reaching consequences.

All relationships take some energy and attention. A balance of energy and attention. If they don’t get enough, they will at the least go stagnant, at worst, die. If they get too much, they can be smothering, have a distorted and unbalanced effect.

What does your dance of body and food look like? What does it feel like from the inside? How much attention do you give it? Is there love in that attention? Compassion? Fun? Joy? Substance? Or is there fear? Denial? Tension? Resignation? Even hatred? Or simple unconsciousness? Boredom?

Let what you ‘know’ about health be applied through a lens of sweetness, even if you know you don’t do well with sugar on the physical level. Find safe ways to nourish yourself on ALL levels. Experiment. Be willing to fail.

In other words, be willing to learn. To change. But not because the slave driver in your head is lashing at you with a whip.

Do it because you love yourself.

And if you find you don’t love yourself - well then, that’s where you begin. We always begin where we are. Know that it is possible to love yourself, and to take care of yourself with love.

It’s just a part of the dance you haven’t learned yet. Or have forgotten. No big deal, we can all learn new skills. It starts with the desire.

Do you want to be happy?



Cabbage Tonic, aka Non-Dairy Innoculant
Gluten and dairy-free, salicylate free, candida friendly

Ingredients:

• 1/4 green cabbage, sliced thinly
• 1/2 gallon brine made with Celtic or Himalayan sea salt, or Real Salt

Directions:
Put the cabbage into a half gallon mason jar.

Make your brine. put enough salt in the water to make it too salty to be pleasant, but not so salty that you gag. (Thanks, Alyss!) Pour the brine over the cabbage. Cap tightly and shake well.

Leave on your kitchen counter or in a cupboard for 3 - 7 days, burping daily, until it has become quite active for at least a couple of days, or at least has taken on a sour flavor, not just salty.

Transfer to the refrigerator when it's done. Strain for a refreshing salty tonic, and use a couple of Tbsp when making veggie ferments that do not contain cabbage or cucumbers. You can use it for cabbage ferments, too, but it's not usually necessary. Great replacement for whey in recipes that use that for an innoculant.

Can also be used as an innoculant for nut cheese - which will come in a future recipe.

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesdays.

Salty and strange addictions

Recipe: Multi National, Multi Mineral Sauerkraut

I am prone to fascinations. Fetishes. Strange addictions.

Colored glass items, mainly cobalt. Vessels, especially glass, especially carafes, the 50’s type with graceful shapes and gold or silver foil paint on the outside. Stainless steel and cast iron pots and pans.

I’ve had to make agreements with my husband that if it doesn’t fit in the cupboards, I can’t get it. If I do get it, something has to go.

He has to check with me before recycling any different style bottle or jar. And I’m disconsolate when he forgets. ‘Where’s that little square jar? Where's the tall soda bottle with the plastic lid? I only bought it because I was going to keep it!’

My latest fixation is salt. It’s been growing for a while.

I was first introduced to alternatives to Morton’s in India. Certain Hindu holidays require specific types of fasting, and often only certain types of salt are permitted in these fasts. I still have a couple hen's egg sized salt crystals in jars high up on my spice rack. One is black and sulfurous smelling, and one a beautiful pink. I’ve had them for at least 14 years, and I never knew what to do with them. I’ve put them on altars, smelled them, held them up to the light. I always related to eating them as a religious practice that wasn’t my own, but the aesthetics of the crystals were fascinating to me.

Black hawaiian salt was offered to me at an altar I adorned a couple of years ago, and after the ritual, when the altar was taken down, the salt was not gathered, cast on the earth. I was sad. I wanted that salt.

I purchased a Himalayan pink salt crystal candle holder awhile back. It adorns our dining table, and I catch my kids licking it fairly often.

You must be living under a (salt) rock if you haven’t heard of gourmet salts as the latest rage. Himalayan pink (which is probably the pink crystal high on my shelf), Black Salt (probably the sulfurous one), Celtic Salt, Coarse Salt, Flake Salt, Fleur De Sel, French Sea Salt, Grey Salt, Grinder Salt, Hawaiian Sea Salt, Italian Sea Salt, Kosher Salt, Organic Salt, Sea Salt, Smoked Sea Salt, Table Salt.

I’d been reading about the depletion of the minerals in our soil, leading to the depletion of minerals in our food supply. And I’d been pricing trace mineral supplements for the family. Yikes. I’m not sure I can face adding another supplement to the lineup on the counter every morning anyway. Not to mention the hint of mutiny from the kids whenever something is added to the list.

Besides, nutrition is best in the form of food. Gee, what an idea. I’m interested in finding ways to throw the jars and bottles away, thank you. Not my beautiful vessels, mind you, but the vitamin bottles.

And there’s a piece about our bodies being of the earth. Bones, flesh, hair, nails, pieces of earth. What more natural thing to do than eat the earth. These are the missing pieces of our food, the colors, flavors, aromas in these salts.

But I haven’t figured out how to get them all in our diet. There are different minerals in all the different types of salts, and I’m sure we’re depleted of all of them as a race, unless you’ve been blessed to grow up in one of the rare areas of the earth where there are large humic shale deposits, and all of your food was grown where you live. Ha. Likely.

Suddenly the five pound bags of white sea salt I’d been buying as a healthy alternative to iodized is just oh so yesterday. I still use it to brine my poultry and salt my pasta water, because in those cases most of it ends up down the drain.

Part of the challenge is I want convenience, too. And I’ve got repetitive stress issues, so I haven’t pulled the whole crystals down off the shelf to use with a grater. I don’t like numb fingers in the mornings. And I don’t have an endless budget with which to buy salt grinding apparati.

Slowly, slowly, I’m working new types in. Real Salt from Utah is a staple. It’s finely ground, comparable to table salt. I use it most times when I need more than a sprinkle, and when I need it to dissolve completely and quickly. In veggies, cooking for crowds, and baking. Pinkish grey, it leaves a slightly gritty residue that I’ve gotten used to in my pickles. Chewing earth.

I have a black ceramic grinder on the dining room table filled with Celtic sea salt, moist and grey. Also a shaker with Real Salt.

On my kitchen counter and shelf over my range I have decorative glass jars (vessels again) of coarse ground Celtic sea salt, Real Salt, and regular sea salt. An electric grinder (with a light!) pilfered from my mother, (a gadget freak) of Himalayan pink.

In a bin in the pantry I have a few ounces of Hawaiian black. I had to get it, after losing the sack full gifted me a couple years ago. I haven’t figured out how to incorporate it yet. I think I need another grinder.

I envision a row of ceramic grinders gracing the dining room table, with elegant labels denoting the part of the earth and the color of the mineral inside.

Maybe I’ll begin to use a mixture of two or three different salts in my pickle ferments. I’ll give you a recipe for one now! Making it up off the cuff, let me know if you try it.


Multi National, Multi Mineral Sauerkraut
gluten free, dairy free, salicylate free, egg free, low carb, GREAT for candida

1 medium head cabbage; green, purple, or mix of the two
1 tsp Real Salt from Utah
1 tsp Himalayan pink salt
1 tsp Celtic sea salt
or whatever mix pleases you

If you are already familiar with making kraut, have at it with your favorite method. If not, I offer one method here, but know that there are many methods, and all have their merits.

Shred your cabbage. I like to cut it in quarters, cut off the core pieces, and either slice the quarter pieces as thin as I can with a large chef’s knife, or pass the pieces through the slicing blade in my cuisinart. Sometimes the pieces need to be cut down a bit to fit into the feeder tube of the cuisinart. I don’t recommend actually shredding it, but some people like their kraut that way.

Place the cabbage into a stainless steel or glass bowl and scatter the salt into it. I’d recommend breaking the salts down to a fairly fine grind before using if possible, although coarse might work just fine.

At this point you have a choice. Most people either massage the salt into the cabbage until the cell walls start to break down and release their liquid, or pound the mass with a wooden mallet or other suitable tool until the liquid is released. (This last method is not recommended with a glass bowl.) I have repetitive stress injury however, so I just toss the salt through the shreds, cover the bowl with a kitchen towel, and leave it for a few hours. When I come back, there’s already a bit of liquid in the bowl, and with a minimum of massaging I’ve completed the process.

Stuff the cabbage into a mason jar - it should be just about a quart. Have an extra pint jar available in case your cabbage was bigger or denser than average. Make sure to add all the liquid in the bowl, including the minerals that have separated out of the dissolved salt. Push the cabbage down firmly with your fingers or a spoon, until the liquid rises above the level of the vegetable. Seal the jar(s) and put in a warmish, darkish place for a couple of days. Burp the jar(s) and taste. When you get the spicy zing! on your tongue, the kraut is fermented, although it is fine to leave it on the shelf for a few days more for a different flavored product. Burp it occasionally (burst jars are no fun, and they do build up pressure), taste it, and when you feel like it’s done, put it in the fridge or cool storage. Eat it immediately or store for a while for the flavor and texture to mellow. Fresh kraut is usually very crisp and squeaky on the teeth, aged is softer.

If your kraut seems dry, you can add brine to it - about 1 tsp salt of choice per cup of filtered water.

Experiment with more or less salt, depending on your taste. Some salt is required, to inhibit the growth of nasty bacteria, and allow the growth of good probiotics.

Enjoy! Eat it along side meats, mix into salads, or munch all by itself. You now have a multi mineral food based supplement!

Now, if I could just get my kids to eat it.